Behind Your Business

May 3, 2012 -- The developers behind open source storage platform Ceph announced on Thursday that they have launched the first company to offer enterprise-level support for Ceph, called Inktank.

April 12, 2012 -- Cloud hosting provider DreamHost announced on Thursday that it will deploy Nicira's network virtualization platform which removes the barriers that traditional networks face.

April 5, 2012 -- Web hosting company DreamHost announced on Thursday it has partnered with content delivery network provider CloudFlare to include its performance and security tools as part of DreamHost's standard hosting plans.

February 7, 2012 -- In an email Q&A with the WHIR, DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson talked about how the company is working to maintain customer relationships, and its plans to avoid a similar incident in the future.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider DreamHost has told its customers to change their passwords in an email on Friday night after it detected unauthorized activity on its database, according to a report by CNET.

In the email, DreamHost claimed it had reset all customer FTP passwords as a precaution and that users could create new ones through the online panel. Web panel, email passwords and billing information were not exposed during the breach, according to the report. Despite this, DreamHost still urged customers to change email passwords as a precaution.

According to its status page, things were back to normal as of January 22 at 9:12 pm PST. DreamHost said the delay was due to the “sheer number of customers requesting password changes.”

“We understand your desire to get things working in an expeditious manner and we are working hard to get you there,” DreamHost said in a post on its status page. “We’re examining ways of decreasing the queue depth but we’re still faced with the fact that there is a considerable amount of work to be processed and apologize for the delay.”

On Thursday, the WHIR spoke to DreamHost technical support manager Brian Hill about its email-focused customer support. In the interview, Hill said it updates its users on outages or issues via its status page, and explained its process for dealing with widespread outages. Hill also noted that transparency was important to DreamHost, a sentiment that CEO Simon Anderson echoed in a in a blog post on Saturday.

“In the DreamHost spirit of transparency and openness, I’m providing this update on our blog on the security issue yesterday. It’s necessarily pretty dry and factual, unlike most DreamHost posts, but that’s important to communicate as much detail as possible while not disclosing the inner workings of our security defenses,” Anderson said in the post. “The bad news is that we detected access to one of our databases and took rapid action to protect customer accounts and passwords. The good news is that it does not appear that any significant malicious activity has occurred on any customer accounts as a result of the illegal access.”

Anderson said that DreamHost’s software and security teams have investigated if any customer sites, apps or blogs had been affected by the intrusion and said that so far, no major issues had been identified “potentially as a result of the swift action to force a password reset.”