On Saturday, SmarterASP.NET, an ASP.NET hosting provider, fell victim to a ransomware attack.
The company has more than 440,000 customers and is the third major web hosting service to fall victim to a ransomware attack this year.
Hackers managed to breach the company's network and infect all servers with ransomware.
SmarterASP.NET security experts said they are working to restore the servers. It is not yet known whether the company is using backups to recover the data or whether it paid the hackers .
The ransomware attack also affected telephone lines.
SmarterASP.NET published a message on its official site, informing users about the breach incident:
“Your hosting account was affected by an attack and hackers encrypted all of data . We are now working with security experts to decrypt your data and ensure that this does not happen again.”
Attack
As we mentioned above, the attack took place on Saturday. The main goal was to encrypt customer data. However, other problems arose. The SmarterASP.NET website was down for the entire day. Experts managed to restore it on Sunday morning.
Experts are trying to recover customer data, but the process is not yet complete. Some customers are reporting that they still don't have access.
Most customers used SmarterASP.NET to host ASP.NET sites. However, there were also some who used it as app backends, to back up important data. The ransomware attack also affected the backend databases.
Screenshots were posted on Twitter, showing that the ransomware had encrypted all of the files . The encrypted files had the file extension “.kjhbx”.
As mentioned above, SmarterASP.NET is the third hosting provider to be targeted by ransomware this year. In May, A2 Hosting, a well-known Windows Server provider, was affected by a version of the GlobeImposter 2.0 ransomware.
The second attack took place on the provider iNSYNQ in mid-July. The hackers used a version of the MegaCortex to encrypt data.
Both companies needed a few weeks to fully recover their customers' data. And in the case of SmarterASP.NET it is likely to take that much time, as many data were affected.
Hackers target hosting providers with ransomware because they believe they can make a big profit. The largest payout ever made to a ransomware gang was made by a hosting provider, Nayana, a South Korean company. The company was forced to pay 1.3 billion won ($1.14 million) to the hackers who encrypted its data.
