As many of you will be aware between 18:00 AEST Saturday 10th June and 06:00 AEST Wednesday 15th June, REACHIT servers were offline, causing client websites, mail accounts and other services to be inaccessible. We would like to take this opportunity to provide some background information about this event.
Distribute.IT Pty Ltd (Distribute.IT) is a wholesale web services company that offer a range of services to other web related businesses. Of these, REACHIT purchases wholesale domain names and leases network infrastructure in their Melbourne based Data Centre. Whilst REACHIT owns and maintains its own servers / software, we rely on the infrastructure supplied and maintained by Distribute.IT for connectivity to the internet.
At approximately 17:50 AEST on Saturday 10th June, Distribute.IT was reportedly hacked, in what was termed a "very deliberate, coordinated & malicious attack" bringing down their website, servers and network. During this attack, our servers were in no way compromised and continued to run as expected, however the attack on Distribute.IT and subsequent collapse of their network caused our servers to be completely inaccessible from the outside world.
News Article: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/260306,distributeit-hit-by-malicious-attack.aspx
Due to the nature of the attack and Distribute.IT's support systems (VoIP phones and email), we were unable to make contact, and worked through the night to try and setup some services with a new provider. On Monday our servers were still inaccessible so we decided to take action and after making contact with Distribute.IT, we removed all of our equipment from the Data Centre and began restoring services to our new provider. This process continued through the night and was completed early this morning, and we are now pleased to report that all services are functioning as normal.
Domain name registrations and domain management (.au domains) are still done through Distribute.IT's systems, and as a result these features will be unavailable via the MyAccount management area at this time. We request that if you have any urgent domain management queries that you send them to support@reachit.com.au, and we will action these manually. Additionally, if you are still experiencing any issues with your website, email or other services, please send details to support@reachit.com.au and we will investigate.
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience that this outage may have caused, and we would like to thank all of our valued clients for their patience and support during this time. Our team has been working proactively around the clock over the long weekend to rectify this issue with as minimal interruption as possible. These efforts have proven successful, as all services are up and running whilst parts of the Distribute.IT network and their corporate website remain offline.
Over the coming weeks we will be looking at ways to further enhance the redundancy of our services to eliminate the chance of a similar incident ever occurring again in the future.
Sincerely,
REACHIT
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
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