Linux Malware Operation Windigo Infects 25,000 Web Servers

System administrators are being strongly urged to check their web servers for several pieces of Linux malware including rootkit known as Ebury SSH as part of an operation that has infected as many as 25,000 web servers in the past two years.

Ebury SSH is being used as a key part of a large and sophisticated operation called “Windigo” outlined in detail by ESET (PDF). Windigo also includes tools HTTP backdoor Linux/Cdorked to redirect web traffic, and Perl/Calfbot, a Perl script used to send spam.

Windigo has been around since at least 2011, and has compromised a wide range of operating systems including Apple OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows (through Cygwin) and Linux (including Linux on the ARM architecture).

According to German government research agency CERT-Bund, Ebury is a Secure Shell rootkit/backdoor trojan for Linux and Unix-style operating systems.

CERT-Bund notes that Ebury provides a backdoor that attackers can use to get a remote root shell on infected hosts. Ebury steals SSH login credentials from incoming and outgoing SSH connections. Systems infected with Ebury are compromised at the root-level and are best dealt with by re-installing the operating system rather than trying to clean it up.

Some antivirus products are capable of detecting Ebury, usually as ‘SSHDoor’ or ‘Sshdkit’. However, ClamAV or tools like chkrootkit or rkhunter currently do not detect Ebury.

ESET notes that victims of Windigo may be Windows end-users visiting legitimate websites hosted on compromised servers, and Linux/Unix server operators whose servers were compromised. Windigo is also responsible for sending an average of 35 million spam messages per day, and more than 700 web servers are currently redirecting visitors to malicious content.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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EMEA Server Revenues Reach $12.4B in 2013: IDC Report

EMEA server revenues reached $12.4 billion in 2013, with more than 2.2 million server units shipped last year, according to the latest EMEA Server Tracker from International Data Corporation, released on Tuesday.

According to the data, EMEA server revenues for 2013 showed an annual decline of 5.3 percent, though the decline in unit terms was less significant at 2.7 percent. Despite negative growth, IDC says that the market has improved compared to the stronger annual declines of 9.6 percent in revenues and 5 percent in units in 2012.

In the fourth quarter of 2013, factory revenue in the EMEA server market reached $3.7 billion, down 5.2 percent over Q4 2012. In Q4 2013, there were 606,548 units shipped, representing a slight annual decline of 0.3 percent.

Compared to Q3 2013, server volumes were up 13.2 percent and revenue up 28.5 percent in Q4 2014. According to IDC, the strong performance over the previous quarter can mainly be traced back to seasonality and a “sign of continuing price sensitivity at times of economic uncertainty and ongoing price competition, particularly at the lower end of the market.”

Despite EMEA being behind other regions in terms of infrastructure spend, EMEA spending on storage, server, and enterprise networking equipment will hit $3.47 billion in 2014, according to a separate report released last week by Gartner.

According to IDC, x86 servers totaled revenues of $2.8 billion in 2013, achieving year-on-year revenue growth of 3.7 percent despite a slight decline in unit terms by 0.3 percent.

“These figures underline the ongoing shift toward higher-end servers with upgrades to models that feature the latest-generation x86 processors,” Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager, Enterprise Server Group, IDC EMEA said. “Capacity increases are also achieved through advances on the virtualization and management software side, making scale out less viable for on-premises data centers in view of the high costs for energy, maintenance, and floor space rental. The trend is of course reversed in large B2C and B2B cloud facilities, which keep pushing the envelope on scale-out, commodity architectures.”

In terms of operating system, Windows held the majority of the market, accounting for 51.6 percent, and generating hardware spending of around $1.9 billion, down 0.6 percent year-over-year. Linux grew 9.3 percent year-over-year, generating sales of $832.8 million and accounting for 22.7 percent of the total market.

In Western Europe, the overall server market declined 3.5 percent in Q4 2013 compared with the same quarter in 2012. Revenues for x86 servers hit $2.1 billion, while non-x86 server revenue totaled $710 million.

“Large data center build-outs by global cloud service providers and social networks accounted for a significant chunk of growth in Western Europe that is most notable in the Nordic region and leads to a greater rise in shipments than revenues due to large deals of commodity servers at low prices from Asian ODMs as well as major server vendors,”Andreas Olah, research analyst, Enterprise Server Group, IDC EMEA said. “However, several countries that saw larger shipments to mega-data center customers in the previous year experienced a decline this quarter including the Netherlands, Ireland, and Belgium.”

According to IDC, in 2013 there was strong growth in Greece and Portugal, moderate rises in Germany, with declines in both the UK and Spain.

Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa server revenue decreased 10.3 percent year-over-year in Q3 2013 with $892.31 million, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of decline. The highlight for server sales in the region was Poland, crediting growth to investments in the government sector and demand from service providers.

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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Bitcoin Exchange Blames Data Center Provider for $100,000 Theft

Présentée par la connaissance de centre de données

Un échange de Bitcoin est de blâmer son fournisseur de colocation pour une violation de la sécurité qui a laissé au vol d'environ 100 000 $ en monnaie virtuelle.

Bitcoins canadienne basée à Ottawa, dit que le personnel du centre de données de Rogers n'a pas à vérifier l'identité d'un escroc à l'aide d'une conversation de web de soutien tech, lui permettant l'accès aux serveurs de l'entreprise. « Il est important de noter que cette violation s'est produite sans aucune authentification effectuée par le personnel du Centre de données de Rogers que ce soit », l'échange a déclaré dans un communiqué.

L'incident du 1er octobre 2013 a été décrit dans une histoire par The Ottawa Citizen, qui dit un utilisateur de chat en ligne prétend être James Grant, propriétaire de Bitcoins canadien. Voici un extrait :

"Selon une copie du texte de la session de chat, obtenue par le citoyen, à aucun moment au cours de la conversation de presque deux heures de longueur a été demandé par l'appelant vérifier son identité. Après avoir demandé, le travailleur de soutien technique accédé à stylo serveur verrouillé de Grant, branché à un ordinateur portable et puis manuellement a donné le fraudeur accès aux serveurs de Bitcoins canadienne, où il a nettoyé un portefeuille contenant des 149,94 bitcoins, environ 100 000 $. »

Rogers a déclaré au journal qu'il a offert un crédit de Bitcoins canadien, qui a supprimé à la place de son équipement depuis le centre de données de Rogers.

« Bitcoins canadien a demandé un compte rendu complet de Rogers au sujet de la violation de la sécurité à leur Centre de données d'Ottawa et a également déposé un rapport de police », a indiqué la compagnie.

"La situation entourant ce client est unique à ce client et ne s'applique pas à n'importe quel autre client des Centres de données de Rogers. "Rogers a été entièrement coopératif avec les autorités dans le cadre de l'enquête, Rogers a déclaré au journal.

Un courriel aux clients de Rogers, qui a été validée sur Reddit, a déclaré l'incident est survenu alors que l'installation a été exploitée par réseaux de granit, qui en cours d'acquisition par Rogers. « Il est à noter que cet incident a eu lieu au cours de la période d'acquisition avant que les Centres de données de Rogers avait le contrôle opérationnel complet de l'installation, » lire le courrier électronique. « Une fois que le Centre de données de Rogers avait pris le contrôle opérationnel complet de cet emplacement de granit, sa gamme complète de protocoles de sécurité a été mis en œuvre. »

Pour en savoir plus, consultez le Ottawa Citizen et CoinDesk.

Article original a été publié ici : http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/03/20/bitcoin-exchange-blames-data-center-provider-100000-theft/

Rich Miller

Rich Miller est le fondateur et le rédacteur en chef de la connaissance de centre de données et a été l'établissement de rapports sur le secteur de centre de données depuis 2000. Il a suivi l'impact croissant de haute densité sur la puissance de calcul et de refroidissement des centres de données et la poussée qui en résulte pour améliorer l'efficacité énergétique dans ces installations.

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Juniper Networks and VeriSign Partner for Hybrid DDoS Protection Solution

Juniper Networks and VeriSign have teamed up to offer a hybrid DDoS protection solution, the companies announced this week. The offering will be a hybrid in the sense that it protects against both high-volume DDoS attacks and targeted application-layer attacks, as well as in the more usual sense of being both on-premises and in the cloud.

Network and application-layer protection comes in the form of Juniper’s DDoS Secure, while VeriSign’s DDoS Protection Service defends from the cloud.

The solution monitors protected applications and adjusts its traffic identification and filtration based on application response and performance.

Mitigation response also adapts, with open source standards of communication between the different parts of the solution. The companies are also committed to automating integration between increasingly heterogeneous networks.

“In today’s network-dependent world, DDoS solutions must be able to detect and mitigate zero day threats and large-scale attacks to help businesses of all types and sizes stay secure, stable and available,” said Sean Leach, vice president of technology at VeriSign. “Our hybrid approach makes this possible by helping to ensure immediate mitigation on-premise with Juniper and in the cloud with Verisign, thereby quickly addressing attacks while also providing the extra bandwidth needed for mitigation as those attacks ramp up.”

A recent threat report from Black Lotus noted the growth of attacks over 100Gbps, highlighting the importance of the ability to scale mitigation efforts quickly. Also in January an Arbor Networks report noted application-level attacks on nearly every survey respondent over the past year.

Clearly organizations with diverse networks need diverse threat protection. The success of this new offering will partly hinge on whether it allows companies to avoid trade-offs in cost and performance as Juniper and VeriSign claim.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a WHIR contributor and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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Web hosting sales and Promos Roundup - March 21, 2014

In the week ending March 21, 2014, A small Orange celebrates March Madness with sales on dedicated servers, NetRepid a roommate agreement provides, PrestaShop provides modules of 15 percent and ITXDesign offers 20% off hosting.

A madness of small March Orange dedicated server sale

A small Orange offers up to 25% on the first Bill of its dedicated server managed hosting plans on the occasion of the month of March Madness. There are four discounts to choice:

HOOPS10 - 10% on the first invoice for 1 month plan

BASKET15 - 15% on the first invoice for a 3 month plan

BALL20 - 20% on the first invoice for a 6 month plan

WIN25 - 25% on a first bill for a 12 month plan

A small Orange, managed dedicated server hosting plans start at $175 per month and include the installation and server, as well as support 24/7/365 monitoring program.

NetRepid offers «Stay in PA» Colocation Deal

NetRepid seeks to capture a portion of the customers affected by colocation adoption BurstNet of Pennsylvania in North Carolina with her stay to deal PA. According to NetRepid, for interested parties who currently hosts with the PA-based data centres, it will waive all setup fee, offer a reduction of hours and provide for a reduction of 20 per cent of the monthly charge for the single, quarter, half and full rack colocation. To be eligible for this offer, interested parties must provide proof of colo current place of accommodation.

PrestaShop offers 15% on modules

To celebrate the release of the 1.6 of PrestaShop, PrestaShop offers 15% on all PrestaShop Modules developed for stores online, including modules for SEO and a reminder of the abandoned cart. To receive the discount, users must enter the PRESTASHOP16 coupon code at checkout.

ITXDesign offers 20% off hosting

ITXDesign offers 20% off hosting with a Twitter deal. Those who are interested in the discount are to enter the twitter code coupon at checkout. ITXDesign offers WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers and VPS.

Nicole Henderson (12 posts)

Nicole Henderson is the editor-in-Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers news every day and offers online, as well as in print. She holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find it on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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Founder of FireHost is complementary skills in new CEO

It may be a coincidence that founding FireHost Chris Drake is deaf in one ear right and Jim Lewandowski is deaf in the left ear, but it is also a metaphor of their complementarity.

Drake recently announced that he would be renouncing his role as CEO for Lewandowski so that it could focus its efforts on the technology of the company as technical director of conduct.

Drake began as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the army American and, wounded, built some of the first display for military systems, before the internet was really the internet as we know it. "I'm an engineer at heart," says Drake. "When the opportunity presented itself to launch FireHost, I have therefore been very curved application..."I've been a developer. »

However, as the company began to grow, he began to find that the realities of managing a growing company have been diverted his attention from development. "As FireHost has continued to increase, I started to become other things, PAHO, and finance and human resources and sales and marketing and all the other functions that exist. '' I enjoyed their learning, but it wasn't my sweet spot. I've struggled with balancing my time between the development of the company... to do the things I like the most, what is product development and innovation. »

Construction of a scaffold for a growing business

In the course of the last year and a half, the Board of Directors of FireHost is built on a "scaffolding" in the form Executive recruits helping Drake discharge of responsibilities and spend more time on the development of products.

Jim Lewandowski

Last year, Lewandowski joined the FireHost Council and has gotten more involved in the company before it became apparent that it would be a prime candidate to lead the company as CEO. "" He knew all the things really although I'm over weak in, "says Drake."

Lie powers Lewandowski in the field of management of technology companies, but it also has a strong technical background which allows it to communicate with the team. "Engineers have a way to solve problems creatively," says Drake. "It has little tech creative engineer learning mode which is in the same way that I work."

At the beginning of his career, Lewandowski has worked in the offshore oil industry, design capable of withstanding high pressure oil well heads. It turned out that the closing mechanisms, he developed high temperature and highly corrosive environments found in deep, offshore oil wells were considered as a solution to certain problems that have led to the disaster of the space shuttle Challenger 1986.

Later, Lewandowski joined IBM where he held a variety of management roles sales and more than ten years that have special competence to communicate in the language that engineers understand. He went to work at BMC Software, committed to Yahoo! by Jerry Yang, and have a role to McAfee and Rackspace.

After all these experiences, Lewandowski said he is very happy to be at FireHost, a company which he regarded as a leader in a field growing. "The market that we are - security and cloud - is a very large market, and I think it will become still more important over time." It notes that stories of hacking and other incidents of security in the news are helping people understand how security affects their lives.

"FireHost is a rather remarkable company," he said. «There is a high technology and perhaps even better technology is environment and philosophy Chris has built this company autour.»

Security taken to market

Now, with the post of CEO behind him, Drake has two main objectives: evangelizing the security and the creation of new products for its customers.

Chris Drake

"The gloves come this year from a messaging perspective," said Drake. He explains that FireHost security practices are what agencies should do and not only meet, but to be truly secure. "Our competition has been very focused on the checkbox in their way of thinking on compliance and security and not best practices oriented. So, I go to evangelize and educate the market. »

Drake will also concentrate on the understanding of what large companies see as their major challenges for the security and development of products to meet their needs. This goes hand in hand with the fact this FireHost visitors are increasingly large companies, rather than SMEs, causing revenue per customer to triple over the past two years. Instead of waiting for visitors to find FireHost, Drake to reach more potential customers.

This effort will be complemented by a R & D budget recently doubled over the next 12 months and the experience of Jim in go-to-market strategies.

Lewandowski said, "Chris and I complement each other, our skills complement each other very well. '' I like to think I'm good for the things that he is not as good, and it is much better technology and vision and those things that I am. »

David Hamilton (14 posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other media. It covers the accommodation industry at the international level since the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and industry issues. David is a graduate of the Queen the University and Humber College School of Media Studies.

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To Fund School Broadband, FCC May Cut Funding for 'Outdated' Services Including Hosting

To shore up money for wireless broadband, a federal program aimed at providing money to connect schools and libraries to the Internet could stop paying for “outdated” services such as pagers, mobile phones, hosted email, web hosting and 800 numbers.

The “E-Rate” program is part of the $8.5 billion Universal Service Fund and is designed to provide affordable telecommunications and internet access to schools and libraries. According to a report from the New York Times, Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler said a special task force will be looking into how E-Rate can be modernized to better meet the needs of the 21st Century.

Only half of the E-Rate funding goes towards high-speed (100mbps) Internet, and no funding goes towards Wi-Fi.

Recently, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel set out her perspectives on modernizing the E-Rate program at SXSW.

“Spending smart means better accounting practices that the FCC has already identified will free up for more E-Rate broadband support over the next two years,” said Rosenworcel. “But spending smart goes beyond that. Because on a long-term basis we need to make sure that all E-Rate support is focused on high-speed broadband.”

She wants network speeds in schools to reach 100Mbps for every 1,000 students soon, and 1Gbps per 1,000 students at all schools by the end of the decade.

Wheeler says the FCC is looking into re-prioritizing wireless broadband services before it looks at tax increases as a way to increase the connectivity of schools and libraries.

While it seems appropriate to do away with funding pagers, mobile phones, and 800 numbers, it may be harder to transition away from email and web hosting, and likely require schools and libraries to pay for hosting fees out-of-pocket.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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Rework Goes from Systems Integrator to Cloud Broker with New CloudPoint Service

A company known as Rework has gone from a systems integrator specializing in Salesforce.com to becoming the meeting point for various cloud services with its CloudPoint.

According to a ZDNet report, Rework represents a trend where many integrators are diversifying to become cloud solution brokers. Rework’s new strategy involves bundling core cloud-based solutions for human resources, finance and customer relationship management that integrate with current systems.

Cloud brokerages can provide a gateway for many businesses to a combination of cloud services spanning IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. According to MarketsandMarkets estimates, the cloud brokerage market is expected to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018.

For its part, Rework’s new CloudPoint service focuses on brokering different cloud-based applications, while adding additional value to the individual cloud services it offers. Some of the ways it adds value is by through application customizations and increased visibility into how they run and their interdependencies. It also provides a centralized place for dealing with licenses, billing, and security.

Earlier this month, cloud broker ComputeNext raised $4 million in funding to spur its sales and marketing efforts, and to create a platform that makes it easier to navigate different cloud services and providers.

While some have pointed out that cloud brokers might add another layer of complexity, confusion, and cost to cloud computing, they may become necessary for some businesses to navigate multi-cloud environments.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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Only 17 Percent of Businesses Are Fully Prepared for Online Security Incidents: Survey

A new report is shedding light on how unprepared many businesses are towards online security threats.

The new cyber incident response report, carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by security firm Arbor Networks, includes the results of a survey of 360 senior business leaders in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Based on responses, only 17 percent of businesses are fully prepared for an online security incident and over a third of firms (38 percent) have no incident response plan in place.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of encountering a security incident is high, with 77 percent of companies surveyed suffering at least one incident in the past two years.

“In the wake of recent high profile targeted attacks in the retail sector, a company’s ability to quickly identify and classify and incident, and execute a response plan, is critical to not only protecting corporate assets and customer data, but the brand, reputation and bottom line of the company,” Arbor Networks president Matthew Moynahan said in a statement.

However, the study focuses not only on highly public security incidents like the attack on Target before the holidays last year, or the outages plaguing the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2012, but also on smaller attacks that may pass by unnoticed.

Understandably, falling prey to online attacks remains somewhat of a taboo. When not legally required to report them, 57 percent of organisations choose not to voluntarily disclose security incidents. And only a third of companies share information about incidents with other organizations to spread best practice and benchmark their own response.

But there seems to be increasing internal pressure to deal with attacks. The report anticipates that more than 80 percent of organization will have an incident response team and plan in place in the next few years.

“There is an encouraging trend towards formalizing corporate incident response preparations,” EIU senior editor James Chambers said in a statement. “But with the source and impact of threats becoming harder to predict, executives should make sure that incident response becomes an organizational reflex rather than just a plan pulled down off the shelf.”

According to the report, the response plans of attack-ready firms are typically led by the IT department, but also draw upon external resources such as IT forensic experts, specialist legal advisers and law enforcement experts.

Companies would be wise to increase their security responsiveness not only to protect their data, but also their reputation, given that the handling of these incidents often have a way of becoming known to the public.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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How Social Engineering Attacks Target Web Hosting Support Staff

As DDoS attacks and malware become increasingly complex, there is another type of attack that doesn’t rely on much technology, aside from maybe a phone or email, and is just as dangerous.

Called social engineering, this type of attack relies on manipulation and human error, tricking victims or their service providers into turning over sensitive information that could be used to access hosting or other online accounts.

“When a lot of people think security attack the first thing on their minds is decrypting data or software viruses, but the vast majority of attacks, and the biggest flaw that we have in software security, are people. We’re capable of making decisions, and we’re quite capable of making bad ones,” Kevin Jones, chief security officer for Thycotic Software, a Washington, D.C-based company that specializes in IT management software tools for system administrators said.

Founded in 1996 as a software development consultancy, Thycotic Software initially developed its flagship product, an enterprise password management software called Secret Server, out of an internal need. It was released commercially in 2005, and today around 100,000 admins from around the world use Secret Server.

Jones has been at Thycotic Software for over 7 years, and as chief security engineer he works with the company’s development team and customers to understand their security needs.

An example of a security incident involving social engineering happened recently, when an attacker was able to impersonate a PayPal employee, get the victim’s credit card information, and use it in a social engineering attack on GoDaddy and Twitter.

“As most attacks we’ve seen recently, it involved a lot of social engineering, which has become an increasingly persistent form of attacks,” Jones says.

The attacker was after the single-character Twitter handle @N belonging to software developer Naoki Hiroshima. In order to get to the Twitter account, the attacker got the last four digits of the victim’s credit card by impersonating a PayPal employee. He then called GoDaddy as Hiroshima, saying he lost his credit card but he remembered the last four numbers. GoDaddy support let him take over the account with just those last four digits, not a typical authentication means for the hosting company.

“Based on what GoDaddy has said in the past, they don’t really do that. That’s not one of their normal authentication means to confirm a user’s identity,” Jones says. “The other thing was the GoDaddy employee also requested the first two digits of the credit card, and most credit cards almost always start with the same four digits because they are used to identify who makes the card.”

According to a report by PCWorld, GoDaddy said the attacker was “already in possession of a large portion of the customer information needed to access the account at the time he contacted GoDaddy” and “the hacker then socially engineered an employee to provide the remaining information needed to access the customer account.”

“GoDaddy didn’t have a strictly enforced policy on how they’re going to identify who their customers are. Based on what GoDaddy said, that particular GoDaddy support engineer kind of stepped out of their bounds on what they were and were not allowed to do,” Jones says.

GoDaddy said it is “making necessary changes to employee training to ensure we continue to provide industry-leading security to our customers and stay ahead of evolving hacker techniques,” according to a statement.

Once the attacker was in the account, he was able to take control of his PayPal, hosting account, and his email. The attacker eventually seized the victim’s Facebook and Twitter. Hiroshima got access back to his GoDaddy account, but only got his Twitter handle back a couple weeks ago.

“The GoDaddy incident is not unique. It’s certainly very prominent because of who the companies are the parties involved, and the owner of the Twitter handle that was compromised,” Jones says.

For hosting providers, the PayPal-GoDaddy incident sheds some light on the potential gaps in terms of account authentication and making sure support staff are trained to understand how to deal with social engineering attacks.

“As someone that would work with a web hosting company one of my immediate concerns would be what are you doing to identify your customers and ensure that my data is really my data and it really stays with me?” Jones says. “How are you training your support engineers, and how are you renewing and validating things that they are or are not supposed to do? If I were to do business with a web hosting company these would be some of my first questions.”

Jones says that customers should ask their web hosts about their training policies around protecting data and how they ensure they don’t get violated.

“Another thing a web host can do is this employee at some point was able to reset or send a reset code to the attacker. In order to do that the employee must have had some kind of access to a system. Internal auditing is going to be the really key thing there,” Jones says.

“As a web hosting company I would want to make sure I have in place is some sort of irrevocable means  of identifying who you are. If i’m able to provide you a non-variable security pin then that at least can confirm that somehow I have some sort of information for this account, and then we can  open a dialogue and resolve these kinds of situations. Really, the best kind of way to resolve these kinds of breaches is to have a conversation with a human.”

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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LeaseWeb expands the network in Singapore

LeaseWeb launches a CDN of presence point to Singapore, the company announced this week. The movement is established network CDN of LeaseWeb more in Asia, increased the speed in the Asia-Pacific region and increase its overall capacity of 100Gbps to 500Gbps CDN in the world.

High-capacity network is one in part because of the focus on SSD-powered infrastructure, allowing to LeaseWeb target its solution business needs distribution large file.

"Unique solution CDN is SSD-powered 100% storage characteristics," said Maurits van der Schee, CDN Innovation Engineer at LeaseWeb. "Most of the time, CDNs use SSD technology only for a small part of the solution. We decided to give all the power of our ca and use of SSD technology only, in order to maximize the effects of caching and prevent the buffering of videos around the world. »

Architecture CDN of LeaseWeb is open-source based and designed in-house, and its point of presence of Singapore was built with material "high end" transported from Europe.

Point of presence of Singapore is called a "SuperPoP" Army Dutch because of his ability and is the fifth installation of LeaseWeb in the world. The initial expansion of LeaseWeb CDN with four SuperPoPs in Europe and the United States was just completed in October 2013.

The week last LeaseWeb have announced a partnership with the manufacturer of server Huawei.

The world of the CDN market is more and more, but it is the competition, services like cloud OneApp platform facilitate newcomers as CDNlion, just as Apple announces it relies on its own CDN, which leaves Akamai with the challenge that threatens to replace the client CDN $100 million.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and WHIR contributor. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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Ubiquity Hosting Receives Strategic Investment from Private Equity Firm Seaport Capital

Ubiquity Hosting announced on Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from private equity firm Seaport Capital to help grow its IaaS solutions, including a planned expansion in Europe and Asia in 2014.

Neither company has disclosed the specific amount of the investment, though Seaport Capital’s target equity investment size, according to its website, is between $5 – $20 million.

Earlier this year, Ubiquity Hosting merged its Ubiquity Servers and Ubiquity Hosting and launched a new cloud service developed in-house.

“With the rapid expansion of our proprietary cloud platform, it makes sense for us to bring in the right partner to help expand and evolve our IaaS solutions for our dynamic customer base,” Clint Chapman, CEO of Ubiquity Hosting said in a statement. “Seaport Capital’s knowledge and understanding of our industry make them the ideal fit for us.”

Founded in 2004, Ubiquity Hosting is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has more than 8 data centers across 7 cities in the US. It provides dedicated, cloud and managed servers.

“We build our cloud hypervisors around high-clock-speed CPUs that meet or exceed 3.2 GHz, datacenter-grade solid state drives, 10 Gbps network infrastructure, and a low number of tenants per hypervisor that significantly reduces the chance of greedy neighbors. The performance level offered by our cloud solution translates into tremendous business value for our customer base.”

With a focus in the telecommunications, information and business service industries, Seaport Capital says it “invests in opportunities where there is an opportunity to grow cash flow, through acquisition and organic means, to create businesses that are leaders in their region or industry segment.” Seaport Capital’s portfolio includes Peak 10, Logicworks and Net Access Corporation.

“The robust platform developed by Ubiquity Hosting offers customers superb value,” Jim Collis, Seaport Capital Partner said. “We are excited to partner with Clint, Brett, and the rest of the team at Ubiquity Hosting by providing capital and expertise to accelerate their development.”

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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Cloud Sherpas to invest 10 million dollars in new neutral Cloud Advisory

Consultant in cloud and Integrator Sherpas Cloud announced Thursday that it will invest 10 million $ over the next two years to expand its independent advisory Cloud of provider practice.

The advisory programme operates independently of its technology services divisions and will be composed of Councillors about 24 in North America, Europe and Australia. The practice Advisory Cloud will serve as impartial guide to cloud Solutions customers.

Before its Advisory program independent of the provider, the consultants managed more Cloud Sherpas 5,000 implementations of enterprise cloud and guide clients in the evaluation of applications including Salesforce.com and Google DocuSign Enterprise cloud.

Google Apps is a popular choice for organizations in the cloud, with third-party applications, helping to drive this popularity.

With respect, interoperability and security review, the role of a consultant could prove to be a valuable resource for companies looking to implement solutions cloud. Hosting service providers have sought to be a trusted advisor to clients, but this approach is different, because it strives to independent orientation of the provider.

Systems integrators have always been an important link in the channel, and as cloud services have become more frequent, some have shifted gears to meet this demand. For example, earlier this week, System Integrator rework is passed to more of a role of broker of cloud with its new CloudPoint service.

Cloud Sherpas VP Matthew Johnson will take place in practice, CEO David Northington. Cloud Advisory program will officially launch in mid-April at a client event.

"Cloud has fundamentally changed the landscape of technology and business," said Matt Johnson, Cloud Sherpas VP of Global Cloud Advisory. "Move your organization to the cloud is no longer a question of if or when even. Today, the emphasis is on how you will do. Transition to the cloud may seem daunting, but with a proper assessment and strategy, a clear path is possible. "We are excited to formalize our approach to helping customers make this gesture."

Cloud advisory team will help customers navigate their plans of cloud through the Cloud discovery workshop, which includes four key elements: strategy, evaluation of the platform through assessment independent technology provider, the capabilities of the company and plan of transformation of clouds.

Nicole Henderson (12 posts)

Nicole Henderson is the editor-in-Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers news every day and offers online, as well as in print. She holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find it on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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BurstNET informs clients of Colocation of higher prices, changing the location

Some clients of roommates BurstNET sent an e-mail this week to inform them that their media and servers would be displaced to the data centre BurstNET Carolina of the North, and from their next billing cycle, charges would increase to take account of the increase in the cost of electricity.

According to the email put online by several customers, costs now range from $99 per month for a single server to $899 per month for a full rack.

The email notes among the reasons for the price change: "over the years the electric cost is systematically passed up, as well as many other expenses that surround the COLO business. We so far have been absorbing the cost spikes. In addition, BurstNET is one of the only providers that does not require a 36 month contract and invoice not the average $399,00 create charges. »

BurstNET also refers to investments in activities in anticipation of the growth as reasons for the changes.

In a telephone call with Keith Vannan of BurstNET, it notes that all infrastructure of Dunmore, Pennsylvania, North Carolina to provide customers more reliability, connectivity and redundancy which was not possible in Pennsylvania.

"Everything we have from Dunmore is moved to the new facility out in North Carolina," he said, noting that dedicated servers and VPS will move this weekend and colocation will be the last to take the step. "It is not cost effective to have a data center, in northeastern PA between increases in rates in Pennsylvania, in the past 3 or 4 months, as well as the additional bandwidth cost... There are many more out there."

He said that most clients understand now that the changes will result in better service, and the price increase reflects a reasonable increase due to the costs associated with the provision of the service. "If you take the price increase, we have, we're still cheaper than almost everyone out there in any way," he said.

The servers will be moved March 30, 2014 with a time of 9 h HE planned March 30 to March 31 at 09.

David Hamilton (14 posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other media. It covers the accommodation industry at the international level since the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and industry issues. David is a graduate of the Queen the University and Humber College School of Media Studies.

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Security, Hybrid Cloud Present Lucrative Opportunities for Hosting Service Providers: Microsoft Study

Hosting providers are often told that security is one of the biggest barriers to customers adopting cloud. Following that logic, it should come as no surprise that security could be the most lucrative cloud opportunity for web hosts over the next few years, a new report by Microsoft suggests.

According to Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream: 2014, a study released on Wednesday and conducted by 451 Research, 7.1 percent of organizations still believe that security concerns and issues are their single biggest challenge over the next two years.

“While cloud environments are significantly changing the way businesses operate today, one thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of security. As a result, security has emerged as the primary, and potentially most lucrative, cloud opportunity for hosters,” Michelle Bailey, senior vice president, Digital Infrastructure and Data Strategy, 451 Research. “Hosting is now the de facto solution for ‘trusted cloud’ implementations, and customers are willing to pay a premium for assurances. Our research shows that 60 percent of customers would pay their hosting service provider a 26 percent premium on average for security guarantees – and an additional 25 percent are already paying for such services.”

Aside from cloud security, the report looks into the phases and types of cloud deployment at more than 2,000 organizations around the world, in a variety of fields including manufacturing, finance and banking, science and tech, healthcare, government and education.

According to the report, on-premises private cloud adoption accounted for 26 percent of on-premises infrastructure spending last year. Hosted private cloud will account for 32 percent of hosted spending in the next 24 months.

In terms of hybrid cloud implementation, 51 percent of organizations surveyed said they had configured a hybrid cloud deployment. Combining an on-premise private cloud with a hosted private cloud was the most popular hybrid cloud configuration, with 60 percent of hybrid users having deployed this type.

Microsoft noted the trend towards hybrid cloud adoption in a study last year, called The New Era of Hosted Services. In an interview with the WHIR, Limena said Microsoft was in a position to capitilize on this trend given its vast partnership channel. Over the past two years, Microsoft has added around 9,500 hosting service providers.

Recently, Microsoft launched ExpressRoute, a new service that offers private connections between customer data centers and Windows Azure, enabling them to use the Azure public cloud as an extension of their private deployments.

Enterprise hybrid cloud adoption will help drive the market, which is expected to reach $79.54 billion by 2018, according to a MarketsandMarkets study.

The study finds that 45 percent of organizations are moving past the pilot phase of their cloud computing deployments, and more than 30 percent now have a formal cloud computing strategy in place.

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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Google upsets Government Snooping with new encryption HTTPS in Gmail

Google has taken another step in its position against the surveillance by the NSA Thursday, promising to use an encrypted HTTPS connection whenever a Gmail user checks or sends an email.

Gmail is HTTPS encryption by default in 2010, but this announcement means that no one will be able to 'hear' messages by moving users to the Gmail servers.

Last year, reports surface that unencrypted data packets passing through fiber between private data centers links could be intercepted by spies of Government without the operators of data center knowledge, which allows the Government to access millions of records per day of internal networks from Yahoo and Google. To remedy this, Gmail now encrypts messages moving in-house as well as they move between the data from Google own centres.

For the cloud, including email services, security is a major concern of the user. Service providers are in a unique position to provide assurance customers, and a new Microsoft study shows that users are willing to pay for it. According to Microsoft, 60 percent of customers would pay their host a 26% premium on average for security assurances

Last year, Gmail was available at 99.97% of the time, or averaged less than 2 hours of downtime for a user throughout the year. Earlier this week, Google Talk and Google + went down for about 3 hours.

Two-factor authentication becomes a privileged means to provide the online services like e-mail, even if it is not perfect. Recently, a new Web site launched to help users to determine in a glance what online services use two-factor authentication.

Nicole Henderson (12 posts)

Nicole Henderson is the editor-in-Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers news every day and offers online, as well as in print. She holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find it on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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The Smart Way to Handle International Transactions

Ecommerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012 according to global estimates by eMarketer. If you are not selling globally, you are (or should be) thinking about it. If you are selling globally, then you are most likely familiar with the issues associated with international transactions. The good news is there is a tremendously impactful solution you can immediately implement.

Take, for example, a provider of hosting services. They employ search engine marketing tactics, dive into search engine optimization, promote their business actively on social media and even invest in reputation management. In a nutshell, they cover all their bases: it pays off. Pretty soon, would-be customers come along in search of the perfect hosting solution. They stumble upon this optimized site. The customers all speak English but are in very different geographical locations; Rajesh is in India, Hendrik in Sweden and Maia in Israel.

All three navigate the site and find the exact products and services they require. Each one takes a quick peek at the posted customer reviews and are quite satisfied with what they read. Finding themselves ready to commit, they each click over to the “Plans and Pricing” tab and select the same service that should cost them each $19.99 USD. This amount is, however, displayed to them as follows:

·         Rajesh sees $19.99 USD as “Approximately‚ 1239.18 INR” (Indian Rupees)

·         Hendrik sees $19.99 USD as “Approximately kr 130.24 SEK” (Swedish Krona)

·         Maia sees $19.99 USD as “approximately ‚ 70.19 NIS” (New Israeli Shekel)

Confusion ensues and a few alarms sound off:  What are “approximate” prices? Is this a foreign company? What’s happening with the currency conversion? What if I have a billing issue?  What if they go out of business? The list of questions is endless and quite understandably, these would-be customers hesitate. They start thinking about all the things that could potentially go wrong and begin to talk themselves out of purchasing from this particular site.

The truth is, even if a merchant still manages to close a sale despite showing “approximate prices” the story rarely ends there. The reason the word “approximately” is used is because this “presented” amount might actually change once the foreign exchanges settle for the night. If the customers in the example above had proceeded with their purchases, this is what their credit card statements might reflect:

·         Rajesh 1347 INR Instead of the Presented 1239.18

·         Hendrik Kr 131.50 Krona Instead of the Presented 130.24

·         Maia 81.25 NIS Instead of the Presented 70.19

When this happens, what follows is never good for any business. Negative reviews, numerous customer support calls, and even worse, chargebacks.

So what can you do to mitigate this particular problem?  It’s quite simple actually: present in local currencies.

Progressive international payment processors allow you to present prices to your customers in a variety of different currencies. When you present directly in the customer’s currency, it eliminates the confusion created by approximate prices and increases buyer confidence. This in turn leads to significantly higher conversions and a great increase in sales volume. More importantly, when your customers receive their statements and the amounts match what they expect, it mitigates the risk of a chargeback, which could negatively impact your merchant account.

Ask your processor about multi-currency processing and allow your customers to shop with confidence, increase the likelihood of return customers, cut down on support employee time and costs and reduces the risk of chargebacks.

About the Author

Jude Augusta, Esq/MBA is the AVP for Global Acquiring for Hosting & Internet Services at Pivotal Payments.  Jude has been in the hosting and domain registration community for the past decade, bringing industry-peer solutions including ecommerce, cloud infrastructures, and supporting services. He is now helping clients implement a global commerce strategy while increasing revenue streams with the GlobalOne platform. Find out more at www.globalone.me

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Data Breaches Cost Healthcare Firms $5.6 Billion Annually: Ponemon Institute

Criminal attacks on healthcare systems have doubled since 2010, but data breaches declined in both number and size in 2013, according to a report published by the Ponemon Institute. The Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security was sponsored by ID Experts, and identifies several areas of concern for healthcare organizations.

Data breaches cost healthcare organizations $5.6 billion annually, though the losses are not evenly spread throughout the sector. Ninety percent of respondents have suffered at least one breach over the past two years, but 38 percent suffered more than 5 breaches in the same period.

With the North American healthcare cloud computing market expected to grow to $6.5 billion by 2018, those service providers who can assure healthcare organizations of their security and compliance stand to gain revenue, but possibly also reputation boosts, which could benefit those companies even further as more sectors come to rely on the cloud for transfer of sensitive information.

According to the Ponemon study, almost 70 percent believe the Affordable Care Act has increased the risk to patients, with insecure exchanges, databases, and patient registration websites all blamed by 63-75 percent, respectively.

BYOD is permitted at 88 percent of organizations, and combined with employee negligence, is presenting a major risk.

“Employee negligence, such as a lost laptop, continues to be at the root of most data breaches in this study. However, the latest trend we are seeing is the uptick in criminal attacks on hospitals, which have increased a staggering 100 percent since the first study four years ago,” Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute said. “The combination of insider-outsider threats presents a multi-level challenge, and healthcare organizations are lacking the resources to address this reality.”

Third-parties are also a source of risk, as only 30 percent of organizations are confident that their business associates are meeting the information security standards of the federal HIPAA Final Rule legislation.

A consulting firm in the UK recently stoked healthcare record security concerns when it uploaded sensitive data to Google servers.

“It’s been a year since the HIPAA Final Rule was issued, and we have seen healthcare organizations make some good progress towards complying with federal privacy and security guidelines and better safeguarding patient information. However, because the threats and risks are shifting, organizations are in a constant state of catch up,” Rick Kam, CIPP/US, president and co-founder of ID Experts said.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a WHIR contributor and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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Almost half of U.S. companies operating in China concerned with data security: study

Forty - seven percent of American companies in China say the security of the data is their main concern with cloud computing, up one percent for a year, according to a survey published this week.

16th annual China Business Climate Survey Report, conducted by the Chamber of Commerce American in the People's Republic of China (China AmCham) shows also internet censorship is an obstacle to the majority of the respondents.

Two-thirds of 365 members AmCham China indicated that blocked search engines ' negatively or slightly negative "harshly felt their business.

Computer issues not dispute also undertaken in China, that 48 percent said pollution of the air makes it difficult to recruit and retain executives.

Data security is surely in the minds of many that she has not mentioned as their main concern with cloud computing, because 68% consider the ineffective Chinese IPR enforcement. Ineffective enforcement may be the least of the concerns of foreign firms with Chinese Government agencies, in 2013, Mandiant has reported that a specific unit of the people of liberation army was hacking businesses, many of them of America.

China has suffered a major failure of the internet in January, highlighting the two challenges with access in China, as well as tensions between the United States and China on data security and network.

Despite these problems, optimism on the climate of China Affairs and the adoption of cloud continue investment in car by American companies. Intel announced it was investing in three Chinese companies cloud in February, and a number of U.S. companies have entered or expanded their presence on the Chinese market by establishing partnerships with Chinese companies, which avoids a licence problem also indicated in the report of the AmCham China. Microsoft and IBM have announced partnerships with key Chinese Data Centre operator 21Vianet last year.

Government of China is certainly eager to develop cloud computing in the market still booming, as evidenced by its recent commitment to invest 1 billion $ in the development of cloud in the coming years.

Much less certain is that it will be able to stay out of its own way.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and WHIR contributor. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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Undersea Cable Network Operator Reliance Globalcom Rebrands to Global Cloud Xchange to Reflect New Focus

Reliance Globalcom has rebranded as Global Cloud Xchange to reflect its plans to deliver a global cloud ecosystem. As part of this strategy, Global Cloud Xchange will build more data centers, and integrate key international assets with a focus on IP and cloud services, according to a report by eWeek.

The Indian company owns and operates a large private undersea cable network that spans 67,000 route KMs. It also sells managed services and has data center operations in 45 countries.

Global Cloud Xchange plans to further invest in facilities and infrastructure to support its cloud ecosystem, and launch 20 advanced data center complexes or “cloud exchanges” throughout Asia and the Middle East over the next 12 months. These cloud exchanges will interact with the company’s data centers, with the goal of offering cloud services in 44 countries by the end of 2014. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Dubai and Oman are among the key locations for these cloud exchanges, according to a report by South China Morning Post.

“We are living in an era where mobile applications, social media, key technology drivers and applications will exponentially boost the volume of digital information being shared every second,” Global Cloud Xchange CEO Bill Barney said. “Our new cloud ecosystem means delivering an interwoven portfolio of infrastructure and data center solutions with sophisticated cloud orchestration capabilities.”

IaaS demand in Asia Pacific is expected to grow by 36 percent CAGR to $7 billion in 2015, according to a recent Parallels report.

The company cites the growth of cloud services in China and emerging markets to support outsourcing, manufacturing, and other services as motivation for the move to cloud services.

That optimism around the Asia Pacific market is shared by DigitalOcean, which expanded cloud services in the region in February.

Global Cloud Xchange also operates on the home turf of Alibaba Group and its cloud provider Aliyun, which began offering its cloud services globally late in 2013.

Chris Burt

Chris Burt is a WHIR contributor and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing projects can be followed on Twitter @afakechrisburt.

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