For about 18 months I’ve been a very happy user of VAServ’s cheap and cheerful VPS platform. The control panel was called LXAdmin (later renamed to Kloxo). A major series of security bugs was found a few weeks ago, and last Sunday the security company that identified the bugs decided in their wisdom to publish the bug list online because they had not had a response to their emails to LXLabs.
Well the sky fell in, and the fall out has been very painful. VAServ lost just about everything: over 100,000 domains taken off line while they tried to fix the break-in/security breach(es). For this company the pain is awful as they have been forced to be acquired (as far as I understand the email I received) by their UK datacentre partner who supplied man power to help out. I doubt the owner, who spent years building his company up, received very much if anything for it.
I lost all my domains. The reason you are seeing this is because I was forced to move to Hostgator to try and get my domains back up and running – I’m one of the lucky ones in that I had full backups of all my sites, both SQL and themes/plugins etc. Not everyone will have been so lucky.
Which brings me to the unfortunate owner of LXLabs who sadly appears to have committed suicide on Monday.
Is a software flaw, no matter how serious, really worth a life?
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