[German]A brief message for people who host ASP applications at the provider smarterasp.net. I have just been informed from Belgium by a user that there is a serious disruption there and it was asked if they were victims of a cyber attack. Currently it seems to only affect customers in Europe, as I saw from a quick research. Here is a rough outline of what is known on the subject.
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Who is SmarterASP.net?
SmarterASP.net is a hoster that offers ASP.NET hosting on its servers, among other things. The provider's data centers are located in the USA and Europe.
According to the above screenshot of the website, there are 60 days trial subscriptions and various 1-click scripts are offered to install packages like WordPress, Drupal, Jomla etc.
A reader's tip
Pieter-Jan B. from Belgium contacted me via email this afternoon because he came across my post SmarterASP.NET hit by Ramsomware from November 11, 2019. Pieter-Jan writes:
Hi Günter,
in 2019 you wrote an article about smarterasp.net being hit by ransomware. Well, I'm a customer of Smarterasp and we and all other European customers have lost access to our websites since thursday. Smarterasp.net communicates next to nothing, but some people got the message that all data is lost (including back-ups). This is a disaster for 1.000s of customers/webshops,…
So the statement is that since Thursday, 14. 10. 2021 the access to the own hosted offer is no longer possible and the provider does not communicate what is going on. Furthermore, there is talk that Pieter-Jan got the feedback that all data including backups are lost.
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The above screenshot of a mail confirms the loss of databases. There seems to be a bigger problem. I was able to access the above web page without any problems – but the status page of the hoster reports this:
here, it is succinctly stated that there is an outage on the EU servers and that they are working on fixing it. The services in the USA and Asia are not affected. Those affected on Twitter are surprised that there are not more tweets.
Users in this group are also venting their frustration on Facebook. The following post seems to confirm via the screenshots that databases and backups have been lost.
The hoster is keeping quiet about what exactly is going on. Whether it is an attack by ransomware, as in 2019, which affected 440,000 customers at the time (see SmarterASP.NET hit by Ramsomware) is unclear so far. Any of you affected?
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This is the second time they attacked with ransom again. For any users that still use their service, you better periodically backup your files and database. Their price are cheap but you can't count on this provider. Their security systems are really weak. It is weird if this happened again. I can't rely on this provider, I believe it will happened again in next few years. Better to avoid them! There are many .net hosting provider that offer high security system, for example Asphostportal or if you have high budget, then Azure can be good option to host your Asp.net website.