Breaking: Major US hosting company Layered Technologies have been hacked. Credentials for 5-6000 hosted accounts - and the data stored in them, including customer details in web stores - have been compromised.

The company has sent out the following (once) confidential email to all its customers - thanks to the VentureCake spies for sending it our way.

Confidential

<Customer Name>

Protecting our client’s account information is a top priority, and we value the trust you place in Layered Technologies. Regrettably, criminals are increasingly using the Internet for illegitimate purposes. As is the case with many companies that maintain databases of information, Layered Technologies is from time to time subject to attempts to illegally extract information from its databases.

The Layered Technologies support database was a target of malicious activity on the evening of 9/17/2007 that may have involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and server login details for 5 to 6,000 of our clients. Layered Technologies responded immediately to this specific incident by conducting a comprehensive security audit of internal processes and procedures.

Due to the significant amount of uncertainty in determining which accounts may have been impacted, Layered Technologies felt that it was in your best interest to take the precautionary steps of reaching out to you and all clients regarding this issue. In addition, we are asking all of our clients to change the login credentials for all host details they have submitted in the past 2 years. This includes any login credentials for the following: Cerberus, Modernbill, Encompass, and all servers you own and operate with LT, all services that may have submitted passwords in the past for such as Webmail, Remote Desktop, SSH, MySQL, cPanel WHM, FTP Backup storage or similar services. Please utilize the ‘reset password’ features on all of our tools to reset and send a new random password. Any LT customers needing assistance with resetting passwords should contact our technical support team via our ticketing system for methods for how we can assist with resetting them and not providing the updated passwords in the tickets.

We are committed to maintaining an ongoing dialogue with all of our clients about Internet security and the steps Layered Technologies is taking to protect its clients. LT has launched a series of initiatives to enhance and to protect the information you have entrusted to us. Some of these steps are being immediately implemented, while others will be put into place as appropriate.

We believe these actions are the responsible steps to protect the trust you place in LT. We will continue to share information with you about the enhancements we are making.

Sincerely,

Todd Abrams
President and COO
Layered Technologies Inc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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