Downtime of cycling-review.net was experienced in the period 22-08-2023 – 22-09-2023 due to an advanced ransomware attack on the infrastructure of a friend’s webhosting company. I was using their webhosting services for many many years with high satisfaction and good quality.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Downtime cycling-review.net – How it unfolded ?!
In the below publication you can read more of the specific details, but both cycling-review.net as well as my personal blog www.remo-knops.com were affected and thus down (not reachable).
Translated from Dutch into English this means:
Interruption of services due to ransomware attack
Dear customer,It is with deep regret and a heavy heart that we have to inform you of a serious incident that recently occurred at BServed.
Unfortunately, we are experiencing a ransomware attack that has affected both our normal storage and our backup storage, making a large portion of our services currently inaccessible.
We obviously understand the seriousness of this situation and would like to inform you of the steps we are (trying to) take.
What happened?
On August 22, 2023, we discovered that our backup system was hit by an advanced ransomware attack. This attack compromised our normal storage infrastructure, as well as our backup storage. This has led to significant outages of our systems and services.Our response and measures
The attackers demand a “ransom” to get our, and your, data back. It is important to note that we are unlikely to be able to comply with the attackers’ demands simply because we do not have the funds to do so and paying does not guarantee the recovery of our data. We understand, of course, that this is a difficult decision.Impact on our services
Unfortunately, this attack has a significant impact on our services. Currently, many of our online services are unavailable. This includes our complete web hosting platform, as well as services such as webmail.The mail servers are accessible and their data is secured. The domains and DNS services also continue to work.
We understand that this is a major inconvenience to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
What now?
We understand that you have questions and concerns. We want to assure you that we are doing everything we can to restore the situation as quickly as possible, but we must also be realistic: There is a chance that this will not work.In the meantime, we would like to ask you to be patient and monitor this website for any updates.
We would like to express our sincere thanks for your understanding and support during this difficult time. We remain committed to the safety and recovery of our services and will keep you informed of further developments.
Yours sincerely,
BServed Hosting
Concluding thoughts and wrap-up
Having a back-up strategy in place, I can recover almost 85-90% of the data that was under the website(s) and luckily I’m not running a webshop or professional high traffic news website. I’ve put confidence in BServed hosting and waited for a resolution to be found.
Unfortunately all the hard work (behind the scenes) of the BServed Hosting team resulted in a tough call, to quit providing services as of 01-10-2023. So I’m in the process of building up the WordPress website again on a different infrastructure and migrating data.
I have a clear picture of what quality information articles were published on which dates, so I will use the original publication dates (when building up the 60+ articles and pages again). Of course this will take some time, so expect some inconsistency in the normal weekly publication rhythm.
