We were doing cyber security on a server that had been hacked. We were improving the security, but that was hard to do because it was the nastiest defaced server we’ve ever encountered. Everywhere you went the customers of the company and the administrators saw dead bodies of children strewn across the ground with blood coming out of their body. They were lying in heaps upon heaps of dead bodies everywhere you went on the site. The server had been hacked by a foreign country or someone sympathetic to a foreign country alleging that the United States was killing their people. We did not take the time to try and independently verify the claims, because we had to get that server back in proper condition as quickly as possible.
Customers were horrified and wanted the images removed, so we did, but we did so much more then that. We used our experience to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. We made the server far more secure and made many security recommendations. however some were ignored by the customer. The company quickly learned that ignoring security recommendations from cyber security experts is a big mistake and they learned it the hard way. They were hacked again to the horror and outrage of their customers. After we cleaned up yet another hack on their server, they took cyber security very seriously and finally putting all of our security fixes into place, even though it made a few customers grumble because it was an inconvenience.
Did they lose customers due to those hacks? Yes, they did, but due to our quick response to the disaster they retained enough to barely stay in business and are doing far better today.
What should you learn from this experience about a defaced server? That server security is very important or you too may end up a victim of cyber crime. We hope you won’t have images of dead bodies everywhere, but you will lose customers and stop working on other things you might be doing to respond to the hack, thus a loss of even more money.
If you run a server, retaining our services to secure your servers as much as we can or as much as we can within the time constraints you put us on. We offer one affordable security audit that looks for gaping holes and is much more affordable and another that is an extremely comprehensive security audit fixing everything we can find.
