A ransomware attack has forced Managed.com, a well-known provider of managed web-hosting services, to take down all its servers. The incident happened on Monday, November 16, and impacted public web-hosting systems.

As a result, some customer sites were encrypted and no longer accessible. At first, the company said the attack only affected a limited number of customers, adding that it immediately took them offline. But hours later, Managed.com revealed it shut down its entire infrastructure and is working hard to fix the issue and restore all systems.

The web-hosting service initially labeled the attack as unscheduled maintenance. But it later admitted it was, in fact, a cyberattack as the tech support team sent emails to the affected and angry customers. The services that went down included WordPress and DotNetNuke, in addition to email servers, FTP servers, DNS servers, online databases, and RDP access points. Managed.com said it is working with the authorities to identify the culprits and bring all client systems back online. 

However, customers are worried that their websites might stay down for weeks, as with other web-hosting ransomware victims. That includes A2 Hosting, which suffered a similar incident in May 2019 that knocked its services out for over a month. During that time, a lot of its clients’ websites remained non-operational. Other web-hosting and data centers that fell victim to ransomware attacks include Equinix, X-Cart, Cognizant, CyrusOne, Dataresolution.net, Internet Nayana, and SmartestASP.NET. 

Ransomware is a form of malware that mostly relies on phishing scams to spread. Cybercriminals send emails in bulk, posing as legitimate companies and businesses. These contain malicious links, files, documents, sheets, or other attachments that infect your device once the victim clicks on them.

After infiltrating the device, they proceed to encrypt files and other essential folders. And the only way to recover the data by paying a ransom. According to a screenshot that BleepingComputer shared, the ransomware gang behind the Managed.com attack was REvil. The criminals demanded a $500,000 ransom in Monero in exchange for the decryption key.

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