Addressing MCProHosting’s recent downtime.
At MCProHosting ensuring the protection of our customers’ data is our #1 priority. Recently, you may have noticed we experienced a period of downtime on our site and some social media accounts.
This post is to inform all of our customers and community about MCProHosting’s recent downtime, what specifically occurred, what steps we’ve taken.
1️⃣ What Happened
On May 27th, 2020 at 12:44PM EST an unauthorized user gained access to MCProHosting’s Cloudflare account. This user redirected MCProHosting’s MX records, which handle email delivery for company-wide emails.
This allowed the user to begin intercepting emails sent from and sent to any addresses under the @mcprohosting.com domain.
The attacker did not gain access to the MCProHosting email accounts themselves, and was only able to receive new emails sent until our domain registrar locked the mcprohosting.com domain.
The attacker used their ability to receive incoming emails to reset and gain access to certain company accounts, including our Community Discord, Twitter, TrustPilot, etc.
On May 30th, 2020 our registrar restored our mcprohosting.com domain, allowing us to bring our website and company emails back under our control.
2️⃣ What Information Was Involved
We have determined that no customer cardholder information (credit card numbers, CVV, expiration dates) was compromised due to this incident.
MCProHosting is a PCI-DSS compliant company and does not store cardholder information.
—–
Only 0.2% of our customers potentially had the following information viewed:
– First name
– Email
– Transaction IDs
– Payment Amounts
– Plan Names
If we determine that your information was viewed by the unauthorized user, you will be contacted by the end of the week
—–
MCProHosting’s billing system unfortunately had to be rolled back to May 19th, 2020. Tickets, transaction logs, invoices, and orders created from this date to May 27th were lost.
We were able to rebuild a record of the products purchased during these dates. If you have been affected by this rollback, you will be contacted by the end of the week.
—-
MCProHosting unfortunately suffered a total loss of its user backup system. This would be the system on which your backups are stored when creating them in OneControlCenter.
3️⃣ What We Are Doing
In response to this incident, MCProHosting will be taking the following measures:
-
Requiring that affected users change their Client Area password
-
MCProHosting will soon be introducing a 2FA (2 factor authentication) option for all customers
-
Increasing the frequency of security audits for all company accounts and systems
-
Increasing the frequency and redundancy of company-wide backups
-
Taking extra measures to further secure client and company accounts
-
Hiring a security firm to audit company systems and accounts
Creating stronger procedures for keeping customers and our community informed if such an event were to take place again
4️⃣ What You Can Do
You may change your Client Area password by clicking on “Forgot Password” at the following link: https://clients.mcprohosting.com/clientarea.php
You may change your OneControlCenter password by clicking on “Forgot Password” at the following link: https://panel.mcprohosting.com/login
Outside of MCProHosting we’d recommend following these tips for helping secure your personal accounts:
-
💪 Choose strong passwords.
-
We recommend that you use sites like passwordsgenerator.net.
-
Site’s like these help you create stronger passwords.
-
-
🙅 Do not use the same password, security question and answers for multiple online accounts.
-
🔒 Enable 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) on your personal accounts (Email, social media, wherever possible.)
-
Adding this additional layer of security to your personal accounts helps prevent unauthorised access.
-
Available services include: Authy or Google Authenticator (Found on the App Store & Google Play).
-
From all of us at MCProHosting, we thank you for your continued support, assistance and understanding regarding this matter.
We’re tremendously thankful to all of our customers and in our community, we hope this email goes a long way in explaining our further commitment to user safety as well as even tighter company security.
