Russian hosting firm Beget rebuilds cloud after data-wiping attack
Recovery is slow: over a week on, only part of its shared hosting and dedicated servers are back, with about 1,000 servers still awaiting manual checks.
Russian cloud and web-hosting provider Beget has had to rebuild its cloud infrastructure from the ground up after a data-wiping attack. On the night of November 1, an intruder reached the management systems covering its whole architecture and ran scripts that zeroed out stored data, after which Beget cut every server off the network to contain the damage. The company said VPS, S3 and Kubernetes data, along with CDN settings and IP configurations, were lost, and its VPS binary backups were wiped entirely while file backups survived for only about half of VPS users. Roughly 1,000 servers must be checked by hand for vulnerabilities and hidden scripts before returning to service, and by more than a week after the attack only 60% of shared hosting and 40% of dedicated servers had been restored. Beget reports no evidence that data was downloaded or altered, has informed police and government agencies, and is working with cybersecurity firms on recovery.
Why it matters
The attack destroyed data rather than stealing it, so customers who lost VPS backups have no recovery copy to fall back on and must rely on whatever file backups survive. For the wider hosting market, the case shows how an intruder reaching the management layer of an entire architecture can take down a provider's whole infrastructure at once, and why a provider may have to rebuild rather than repair. Beget reports no sign that data was downloaded or altered, so the immediate harm lies in lost and inaccessible data rather than exposed information.
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