HostGator employee arrested for rooting 2700 of their servers?

arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/former-employee-arrested-charged-with-rooting-2700-hostgator-servers/

Thankfully they put a stop to his activities early last year, but still, that's kind of scary. Indeed, it's a great example of why a hosting company should really do strict background checks on its employees before hiring them. And from what I hear, he had been working at other hosting/server companies like Rackspace before his recent arrest too...*

It's also a good warning to anyone looking for hosting to be aware of the damage a rogue hosting company tech could cause. And to be very much aware of any possible security issues.

What do you think of this story?

* From a post by a Hostgator employee at Web Hosting Talk

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1258507

 

I think it's appalling. They should have detected this as soon as it was carried out, and put a stop to it. That's massive untrust going on there.

 

omg! this is very bad, companies should be very careful with the staff, of course anyone can try this, but should have tight security measures.

 

CM30 Thank your an interesting post. The owners of these organizations have a duty of care towards their customers and their security. Sadly quite a few are falling down badly in this area.

Even when warned about bad employees, some of these organizations just ignore their customers, and it is not until the shit hits the fan that they take action.

The real question here is how much damage did he do before he was found out?

The lack of security was why we moved away from Hostgator to another host.

 

This sort of thing is unacceptable. It seems like this should have been avoidable. Don't they have some kind of change log for that level of the system? Oh, and somebody to review the change logs on a regular basis.

It seems like this guy was planning something rather big. He may not be working alone.

 

And I thought Hostgator couldn't get any worse. Talk about bad security.

 

I fear that you may be correct.

I suspect there is a lot more to the story than Hostgator has publicly said.

 

Wow, that's scary, given the fact that I was considering working with hostGator just a few months ago

 

This makes me wonder how vulnerable smaller hosting companies can be...

 

Sadly, given the large amounts of money the bad guys are making, they are in a position to bribe or pay off some people who are vulnerable and in positions of control over certain things.

 

Whoa... That is some serious stuff, right there! Wow. Just...Wow. Man, you've gotta be arrogant as all get out to think that you're not going to eventually get caught doing something like this on a grand scale like THAT.

 

An issue like this is bad by the sole action, but the worst thing here is that the issue was made public.

Good to raise awareness among people using any hosting service, but bad for Hostgator, which reputation is everyday more and more deteriorated.