The Network Security. Org

I love when a call comes in, especially on a holiday morning, where my services are needed and solutions are easily provided. At least that’s what I always hope for.

In this case I got a call from a medium size company (let’s call it ZZZ, Inc.) with an extremely anemic IT department (one person) and they were having problems with their web server. The server had been out of commission since late Friday, and here it was Sunday morning. Not my typical security gig, but I was sure it would be a fairly easy fix. A web server down seemed like a pretty simple problem at first blush.

Seems that ZZZ was switching from one web hosting provider to the provider’s parent company. Only problem was that the larger hosting company had uncovered the fact that ZZZ hadn’t been paying for the SQL server back end supporting ZZZ’s Content Management System, and ZZZ’s CMS was serving every single page for ZZZ’s web site.

Friday afternoon rolls around and the larger web hosting company requests a change in the contract to allow for ZZZ to have SQL server hosting as part of ZZZ’s solution. Emails were exchanged and confirmed between the companies and then nothing. No web site, nada. Seems that for some reason that the SQL server back-end that was pushing pages went away. And the large web hosting company was saying that they couldn’t do anything about it until Monday morning. Oh, and did I say that ZZZ didn’t have an on site copy of the SQL database running the CMS. Because of that fact ZZZ didn’t have one piece of web content that wasn’t at least a year old. Zero Day Security

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