Thousands of sites compromised following hosting provider hack
California-based hosting provider InMotion has suffered a compromise that resulted in the defacement of thousands of home pages of websites hosted on their infrastructure, which were allegedly set to serve malware.
The compromised was confirmed by InMotion president Todd Robinson in a post published on the hosting provider's forum on Monday, in which he said that the "large scale website defacing attack" happened on Sunday, September 25th, and that the hacker's goal was only to deface websites.
"At this time, the attack does not appear to have been any more malicious than replacing the web site's home page; the defacement worked by replacing index files in all public_html directories with the attacker's index.php file," he wrote. "Gaining passwords was not a goal and was not accomplished. The hacker used a system exploit to change a system password to allow him to access index files. We have blocked the exploit and changed the system password. As always though, it is recommended that you update your Cpanel and FTP passwords."
