E-commerce software provider X-Cart suffered a ransomware attack in late October that brought down customer stores hosted on the company's hosting platform.
The incident is believed to have occurred after attackers exploited a vulnerability in third-party software to gain access to X-Cart's hosting store systems.
“We have identified the vulnerability, but we don’t want to reveal what it is until it is confirmed by security ,” said Jeff Cohen, marketing representative for Seller Labs – the company behind X-Cart.
Cohen said the attackers gained access to a small number of servers, which they encrypted , effectively taking down X-Cart stores. Some stores went down completely, while others reported problems with email notifications being sent .
"The outage affected a small percentage of our infrastructure, primarily our shared hosting servers. Our core systems were not affected," Cohen said.
Meanwhile, Cohen said that “all customer websites have since been restored.”
Nevertheless, the outage, which lasted a few days, led some store owners to file a lawsuit against the company.
Cohen said the company's "first priority" during the ransomware attack "was to get every customer back online and ensure we have a stable and secure system."
The director of Seller Labs said that it is keeping communication channels open with any customers affected by the recent ransomware attack and encouraged them to reach out to the company for assistance or any questions.
Regarding whether Seller Labs paid the ransomware gang to recover its files, Cohen said that it chose to restore them from backups and that payment could not be made in any way because “the hackers did not provide any means of communication.”
X-Cart joins a long list of ransomware incidents that have affected various web hosting and data center providers. The list includes Equinix ,CyrusOne, Cognizant, A2 Hosting, SmarterASP.NET, Dataresolution.net, and Internet Nayana.
