One of the services Mdesign offers is web hosting. Recently, there have been password incursions on accounts one a server in the data center where we host. One compromised account had over 10,000 spam emails a minute going out! Not only does this jam up the server, but the domain gets blacklisted as a spammer. We realize this is going to be inconvenient, but we have to got through a round of changing all passwords for site ftp and email accounts.
: : : : : : : : : : : : More information from the data center : : : : : : : : : : : :
Over the past few months, we have been experiencing an increase in brute force attacks to our servers from countries like China, Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe. Cyber terrorism has become a very serious threat and we taking action to combat such acts.
These attacks target simple passwords for email accounts, FTP accounts and WordPress sites. Once a password has been discovered, hackers break into the accounts and send out spam from the server causing huge issues. For this reason, we are implementing new security measures on all our servers.
There will be new standards for password strength, each account must have a password that is a minimum of 14 characters with a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numeric and alphanumeric characters.
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :
Yes, this is a pain, however, it pales in comparison to the raging storm that will ensues when email accounts get compromised. We would not ask this if I was not convinced that there is a risk of compromise.
We will make this as painless as possible, and keep you up to date as this process continues.