Dear Worldzone Pro Members,
As you all now know, we were experiencing extreme technical difficulty for most of the day yesterday. The control panel was offline, FTP was shut down, and many web sites were not available. This was all a result of a hack that occurred at 8:30am EST on Thursday 1/9/03. The hacker managed to reroute our DNS so all domains on our first (Zeus) server pointed to another site. The web site in question stated that the site had been hacked and had a lewd image. In everyone's best interest we shut down the server. Within half an hour we were able to reinstate our DNS but in efforts to keep the hacker out of the system, we had to shut down our control panel and close FTP. During the brief time the hacker was in our system, they left a Trojan in our root directory, which was causing the problems with MySQL, PHP, and the main site. We were able to keep the hacker out of the system but in the process, had to reboot the system at least 15 times. With our efforts we were able to trace the IP address used to enter our system and collect logs on their actions. We were able to determine the Service Provider they were using and their Internet service has been terminated. Their actions have been logged with their ISP and we along with their ISP will be pursuing legal action against them.
We wish to apologize about not contacting you sooner but with the control panel down, we weren't able to send out a mass email. We contacted those whom we could by searching our support emails but we were not able to contact everyone. You will be glad to know that we were able to remove the hacker before they were able to delete any web site content or even find where anyone's personal information was stored. The Trojan that was left on our server has already been cleared out, and no credit card information has been compromised.
In the past five years Worldzone has never been successfully hacked. We have received many attempts in the past but no one has ever been successful. The person who did this was a professional, but as good as this hacker was, their efforts could do no more than cause a few hours of intermittent downtime and some PHP errors. For the rest of today, we will be monitoring the site and repairing any left over errors that we find.
If your site still presents errors or if you have any trouble accessing email, FTP, or any of our other services please post in our forums at
www.worldzonesupport.com or if you have any questions about yesterdays events you can contact
webmaster@worldzonepro.com. We will keep you informed about any legal action taken against the hacker as soon as we are able.
Thank you again for your support,
Alycia Meier
The Worldzone Group
