My host cracked and my blog lost

June 14, 2009 by Amr

On the 8th of June, at 1am GMT I received an e-mail from my blog host, VAServ, announcing that they were cracked around 7pm GMT on the 7th of June. They were cracked through a vulnerability in HyperVM software (a software for managing vps instances across servers).

As a result, I lost 100% of my data. Here is exactly what happened.

I was at work, and I immediately checked my blog and found it to be working. By the time I got home, it was no longer accessible. That was strange, because VAServ e-mail indicated that they brought down most of their VPS nodes which had been cracked.

I sent an e-mail asking about why it's has been taken down now, they said that they are investigating it. I didn't understand, because I had just accessed the VPS few hours earlier and it was fine.

2 days later, they reported that that node had 100% data loss. But sorry, that can't be true, because again, I had accessed it myself and it didn't have any problems.

I wasn't taking regular backups of the blog. Lesson learned the hardway. Apologies for everyone whose comments were lost.

On the good side, I was able to recover the majority of the blog. This blog was the launchpad for many Drupal patches, and for the purposes of development I had a not-very-outdated copy running on my laptop!

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