Greetings Hosted Sites,
It is with annoyance and shame to admit on the 30th January, someone successfully hacked our server and overwrote all index.* files with a signature message. This happened at the most critical of times while we were planning out a datacenter move/server upgrade, which has inconvenienced not only all of you, but us in a way I don't even want to bring up. It also has caught us without access to a system-wide backup - though fortunately nothing is lost, except all files resembling index.*. This sadly includes any forum templates which make use of files like index.htm. I admit I feel lucky this hacker didn't choose a more drastic action, as it could've literally been the end of edgenetwork entirely due to the crucial time he struck.
I have personally been overviewing the entire process of trying to bring everything online, including not having slept since it occurred. I do not wish to name & badmouth the datacenter we are currently hosted at, but they haven't exactly provided us with helpful support in the areas where we have no control (physical access to our servers). This is why we have been down for more than an entire day. As it stands, we have the network online, with all services resuming as per normal. Web is also online, but your sites still have 'corrupted' index files which you, I'm sorry, will need to replace. I will be placing a file "overwritten_files.txt" in all root website directories (ie. /domain/subdomain/overwritten_files.txt), which will list all index.* files under that path that you will need to attend to. With the above said, we are still waiting on techs at the datacenter to finish one last task that will require a reboot, assuming they do their job and we've done ours properly, the system will reboot and everything back in order. There is a fraction of a chance something will go wrong, as things do with technology.
As for how this hacker managed to succeed. In four years, we have never been hacked successfully. Hundreds of people have made use of the exploits in open source projects including but not limited to, PHPNuke, PHPBB, etc. Those who have exploited the script and tried to gain access have always failed, due to our security team keeping the system airtight. Literally hundreds had failed not from lack of trying, until yesterday. So with this, we have tried our best time and time again to keep the system secure, but unless we ban the use of open source scripts we'll continue to have people trying. I make this plead to all those using scripts such as PHPNuke to *keep them uptodate*. We have to continually keep the system uptodate, so please do your small part.
Lastly, as said above, we are planning a datacenter move. This move should be hardly noticeable, with only a few hours downtime. It will most likely be occurring within the next week.