Early Morning Outage for 85 Minutes
Date: Tuesday, April 10 @ 09:00:00 EDT
Topic: Web Hosting Service Announcements


Last night a phishing scammer from Canada posted a HTML form to one of our non-profit forum websites. A spam email was then sent to various external users giving the location of the phising scam. Our network provider, The Planet, was made aware of the scam and disable network connectivity to our main web server at 6am. We removed the offended HTML form, disabled the Forum, and had the network back up at 7:25am. It was a 85 minute outage.

While we are discouraged by any outage, we are still within our 99.9% uptime goal for the year.

A phishing scam is one in which an email is sent to random internet users with the false claim to be from the user's bank. It asks the user to login to their account to confirm information or change a password. The one used in this scam looked like this:


Dear Customer,

Wachovia understands that your trust in us depends on how well we keep your personal, business, and account information secure. We've just upgraded our new SSL servers to protect our customers for a better and secure banking service,against any fraudulent activities. Due to this recent upgrade, you are requested to update your account information by following the reference below...

http://www.wachovia.com/secure/update/ssl.cfm Regards
Security Is Everyone’s Responsibility

Wachovia Bank, N.A. and its affiliates.

The above link actually went to the uploaded HTML form on our non-profit forum website. If anyone were to complete the form, it would email their information to the scammer on another service provider.

We have disabled the Forum and removed the offending material.

If you have any question please give us a call or email us.

Thank you for you patience,
Patrick MacDonald
AthensGuy.com Support





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