A few days ago, when I was checking my email, I saw an email from my hosting provider Radix Hosting with subject line “Account Security Update”. My host had sent me an email to notify me of a recent brute force attack on my hosting account. The following was written in the mail:
Dear Ghatozkat (SomeUsefulinfo.com),
We have noticed a major brute force attack on your web hosting account. We are certain that this brute force attempt was blocked soon enough which most probably caused the attack to fail. However, we have taken measurements just to be sure.
For security purposes we have changed your client area password as well as your web hosting password (cPanel, FTP, etc).
Your new password: XXXXXX
No changes were made to your username.
You are allowed to change your password if that new password
1. Contains at least XX characters
2. Contains at least one lower case and one upper case letter
3. Contains at least one digit
4. Contains at least one symbol such as: X, X, X, X, X, X, etc
5. Does not match the password you had before we changed itYou can log in to our client area with your new password.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.
Best regards,
Josh BurtRadixHosting – Professional shared and reseller hosting solutions
http://www.radixhosting.com
According to Wikipedia:
A brute force attack is a method of defeating a cryptographic scheme by systematically trying a large number of possibilities; for example, a large number of the possible keys in a key space in order to decrypt a message.
The brute force attack on my host was tried by systematically trying a large number of possibilities for my password of my hosting account. Thanks to my host that they prevented it. And it’s good to know that my host implies a mechanism to keep my hosting account secure. And the amazing thing is I am getting all these for exactly 25.2 dollars per year, yeah you read it right, it’s just above 25 dollars per year.
For my money, Radix hosting is giving me 3 GB web space, 30 GB monthly bandwidth, a full fledged cPanel and other services on par with services offered by other big hosts and now after this brute force incident, I know that they also have mechanisms to keep my hosting account secure. This is what you call value for money. Damn, I am happy with Radix Hosting.
