Hacker Behind Recent Hack of Numerous EIG Hosted Websites Claimed They Had Full Access to One of EIG’s Servers Last Year

Last Thursday we mentioned how we had come across a hacker that had recently hacked numerous websites hosted with various Endurance International Group (EIG) brands. EIG does business through brands A Small Orange, Bluehost, FatCow, HostGator, iPage, IPOWER, JustHost and quite a few others. That the hacker was only hitting websites hosted with those brands stood out, since, if say, a hacker was exploiting a vulnerability in a WordPress plugin to gain access to them you would expect to see numerous different web hosts being represented.

At the least, that seems to indicate that the hacker is targeting website hosted with EIG brands, which is possible explanation of that situation. What would seem more likely though is that the hacker is gaining access to some part of EIG’s systems allowing them access to all of the websites on a server. Considering the hacker was hitting numerous website sharing the same IP address, which would likely indicate they are on the same server, that seemed like a reasonable possibility.

Proving that EIG systems are being exploited would be difficult without information they only have access to. Our past experience is that web hosts are rarely even willing to consider that they have been breached, much less admit that it has happened. As we mentioned in the previous post, things are worse with EIG, since they are run by the majority owners of a security company SiteLock and EIG gets a cut of security services sold by SiteLock to their customers. That creates an incentive not to provide their customers the best possible security and what we have heard is when contacted about a hacked websites that they just try to push their customers to SiteLock instead of doing any checking into the situation (that includes someone that contacted us last week that has the been hit as part of this hack).

While doing some more searching around on the message left in one of the files we found on a website hit by the hacker (that is also on the other websites being hit), “Hacked By Isal Dot ID”, we found that a year ago the hacker was claiming to have full access to a server that a website had hacked was on.

At the time of the hack that website was hosted on the IP address 192.185.142.185. The listed ISP of that IP address is Websitewelcome.com, which is HostGator.

(The website is now hosted on the IP address 74.220.219.116. The listed ISP of that IP address is Unified Layer, which is Bluehost.)

While the claim of a hacker isn’t necessarily reliable, it does raise further suspicion that there may be a security issue on EIG’s end. This seems like something they should be addressing. If you have been hit by this hacker and have gotten a response related to that instead of just being pushed to hire SiteLock please get in touch with us or leave a comment on this post.

Hacker Targeting Websites Hosted With SiteLock Partnered HostGator and Other Endurance International Group (EIG) Brands

Recently we have been thinking that a way to help people to better understand why security is in such bad shape despite the amount of money spent on it, is to say to think of the security industry not as that, but as the “insecurity industry”. As security companies are not focused on improving security, but instead of making people believe that insecurity is inevitable and that they can provide protection, but not to the extent that people actually expect those companies to keep them things secure. A prime example of a company that would fit that description is SiteLock, which is a company that comes up often on our blog when it comes to bad practices of the security industry. The other day we had someone forward several messages they had received recently from them and part of one of those stood out:

Malware is a real problem that affects a lot of websites. It’s as prevalent as the common cold and can do some real damage if you don’t catch and treat it early.

So how will you know if your website gets infected with malware?

To help protect your website, your hosting provider has partnered with SiteLock to provide your website with a complimentary malware scanner. Every day this nifty little tool checks the first five pages of your website for malware, and sends you an alert if any is found.

Their idea of protecting websites isn’t making sure that websites are actually secure, which would prevent them from being infected with malware or otherwise hacked, but instead trying to detect the website is infected after being hacked and then offering services that still don’t secure the website. That is great way for them to make money, but it isn’t great for everyone else since websites can continually be hacked.

As that email indicates they are not alone in that, web hosts have partnered with them. Why would a web host partner with a company that isn’t focused on making sure their customers’ websites are secure? Well when it comes to what seems to be SiteLock’s biggest hosting partner, the Endurance International Group (EIG), a partial explanation is that the majority owners of SiteLock also run EIG. EIG also disclosed to investors at one time that they receive 55% of the revenue of services sold through their partnership. That creates a strong incentive for EIG to not provide the best security possible as that would mean less money for them and less money being made by another company owned by the people running EIG. It might explain, for example, why in the past we found that EIG was distributing known insecure versions of web software to their customers through one of the companies they own, MOJO Marketplace.

Over the years EIG has brought together numerous web hosting brands including A Small Orange, Bluehost, FatCow, HostGator, iPage, IPOWER, JustHost and quite a few others. The situation with a website hosted with HostGator that we cleaned up a hack on yesterday seems to be an example of where those incentives might have created a situation that doesn’t serve their customers well.

The website was hacked in way that it would serve spam pages with Japanese text to Google’s search crawler.

While you wouldn’t know it from many companies that cut corners when doing hack cleanups, one of the three basic steps in properly cleaning up a hacked website is to try to determine how it was hacked. With this website the files involved in the hack didn’t really seem to shed any light on that. The main piece of this hack involved code added to the index.php file of a WordPress installation that caused the code in a file at wp-confing.php to run, which would cause that code to run whenever the frontend of the website is accessed. That filename is similar to a legitimate WordPress file in the same directory, wp-config.php, which could indicate that the hacker has some knowledge of WordPress, but considering how popular it is, it doesn’t seem to be a good indication that the hack was anything WordPress related (we also didn’t find anything that was known to be insecure in the WordPress installation).

The hacker had also added the website to a Google Search Console account with the email address “xueqilve@gmail.com” and submitted a sitemap to get the spam pages added to Google’s index.

It looked like the malicious code causing the issue had been added a few days ago (though another file might have been there since November), so there still should have been logging available from when that occurred that would shed more light on the source of that. Unfortunately HostGator hadn’t had log archiving enabled by default in the website’s cPanel control panel, so we only had access to logging for the current day. That fact alone probably should tell you that the company doesn’t have much concern about security and it would be strange to not have that on if they had a legitimate partnership with a security company since that would be an obvious thing to do because of its importance for dealing with hacked websites.

As we have found though, SiteLock usually doesn’t attempt to determine how a website was hacked, so they wouldn’t have a need for that logging. Considering that they don’t usually do that, it makes it not all that surprising that services they offer to protect website don’t work well, since they don’t know how websites are actually being hacked.

We did have one last lead to follow in trying to get some idea of how the website was hacked. In the root directory of the website there was a file named bray.php that contained the following message:

Hacked By Isal Dot ID

Through the website Zone-H, which catalogs defaced websites, we could see that same file had been placed on numerous websites recently. In looking over a number of those websites what stood out was that they all were hosted with HostGator or other EIG brands. Here are examples of websites hit at several nearly sequential IP address registered to HostGator:

If a hacker was hacking websites through a vulnerability in a WordPress plugin for example, that isn’t what you would expect to see, instead you should see websites hosted with numerous different web hosts.

At best you have a situation where a hacker looks to be specifically targeting numerous websites at EIG brands. There is also the possibility they are taking advantage of some security issue on EIG’s end to hack the websites.

Even if they are just targeting website hosted with EIG brands that seems like something that the hosting company would want to investigate and try to prevent as much as possible. That doesn’t seem to be the case here because later yesterday we were contacted by someone else with the exact same hack. They said HostGator has only been interested in pushing SiteLock. When you understand the incentives involved, it really isn’t surprising that is happening.

Update March 19, 2018: We have now come across a article from year ago in which the hacker behind this, claimed to have had full access to a server that contained another website they had hacked. That website was hosted with HostGator at the time (and Bluehost now). While the claim of a hacker isn’t necessarily reliable, it does raise further suspicion that there may be a security issue on EIG’s end

Mr.ToKeiChun69 Defacement Campaign Seems to Be Targeting Websites Hosted with Endurance International Group (EIG) Brands

Yesterday we were contacted by someone looking for second opinion as to whether the web security company SiteLock’s claim that their website contained malware was true. The website’s owner believed that their web host BlueHost and SiteLock might be trying to scam them.

In the case of this website it wasn’t hard to determine that the website was hacked, as this is what was shown on the homepage:

That type of hack is referred to as a defacement hack.

By malware, that may have been what SiteLock was referring to because as we found while previously giving someone a second opinion, for some reason SiteLock labels evidence of a defacement hack as malware (that seems to be a general issue, as they also labeled a spam link that way as well).

After we let website’s owner know that unfortunately the website was hacked, they responded that they felt it was an inside job. We didn’t believe that to be the case, but instead of just saying that was unlikely, we wanted to be able to provide more concrete evidence.

One way to do that would be to find some other websites hit with same defacement that were not hosted with the same web hosting company or another one partnered with SiteLock. When we did a search on Google for “Mr.ToKeiChun69” the first result was a page documenting defacements by Mr.ToKeiChun69 on the web site Zone-H.org, which documents defacements of websites.

In looking at some of the websites that had been defaced by Mr.ToKeiChun69 we found that they all were hosted by web hosting brands owned by the Endurance International Group (EIG). Their brands include BlueHost, as well as A Small Orange, FatCow, HostGator, iPage, IPOWER, JustHost, and quite a few others. SiteLock has a “security partnership” with EIG where SiteLock pays EIG a majority of the fees from services sold through the partnership. The majority owners of SiteLock also run EIG.

While that might lead some to see the worst case, that this was inside job, for us it didn’t. But it did seem rather odd that all the websites would be at one web hosting company and that was possibly an indication that the company has some security problem.

To better understand if there was really a correlation between the web hosting provider and these defacements we did a more thorough check of where the defaced websites were hosted. We checked the first ten websites listed on the 1st, 11th, 21st, 31st, and 41st page of results for this defacement on Zone-H.org. That checked websites that are dated on there as far back as June 29.

Below are the results. We have listed each domain name, the IP address it currently is hosted on, and finally the ISP listed for that IP address or the web host. The ISP Websitewelcome.com is connected to HostGator and Unified Layer is connected to BlueHost, though the websites might be hosted with other EIG brands.

Page 1

  • endblameshameguilt.com: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • acimfordummies.org: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • wakechild.com: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • tena-frank.com: 192.254.236.78 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • acourseinmiraclesfordummies.com: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • decodingacim.com: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • endblameshameguiltgame.com: 192.254.236.84 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • toddtylermusic.com: 192.254.236.80 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • lachildrensridingcenter.com: 192.254.236.8 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • topsportscamcorders.com: 192.254.236.8 (Websitewelcome.com)

Page 11

  • iphonenstuff.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • sneakerpicks.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • dalmatianadvice.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • subscribesave.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • helpmebuilda.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • bestboatplans.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • spelbonusar.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • gamingnshit.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • marenart.com.au: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • retailstartupbookinabox.com: 192.254.236.82 (Websitewelcome.com)

Page 21

  • www.blackandwhitesecurityltd.com: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • dallasgayboys.com: 192.254.232.86 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • untieeecs.com: 192.254.232.86 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • jonathanjoyner.com: 192.254.232.86 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • www.smcntx.com: 192.254.232.86 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • www.culinairteamzeeland.nl: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • strandvakantieman.nl: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • napers.nl: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • www.camping-renesse.nl: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • www.campingdebrem.nl: 192.254.232.90 (Websitewelcome.com)

Page 31

  • 81tagorelane.com: 50.87.147.75 (Unified Layer)
  • skies39-newlaunch.com: 50.87.147.75 (Unified Layer)
  • newlaunch-gshplaza.com: 50.87.147.75 (Unified Layer)
  • 3dinvisibilitycloak.net: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • professional-liability-insurance.net: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • lyynx.net: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • aksolution.net: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • krilloils.org: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • 3dinvisibility.org: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • ellipticalmachineshelp.com: 192.232.251.55 (Websitewelcome.com)

Page 41

  • topwebber.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • yoholly.info: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • myironsuit.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • laptoplifestylecafe.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • bellyfatcombat.net: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • herbzombie.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • biggerbuttshortcuts.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • blowtalk.com: 192.185.21.208 (Websitewelcome.com)
  • waisttraineraustraliaco.com: 66.198.240.58 (A2 Hosting)
  • besthairextensions.co.nz: 192.185.44.88 (Websitewelcome.com)

With 49 of the 50 websites currently being hosted with EIG that would certainly seem to point to there is some correlation between the web host and the hackings. As with something that doesn’t have a connection to a web host, you would expect to see a fair amount of different web hosts showing up with that many websites.

So what about the one website that isn’t currently hosted with EIG? It turns out it was hosted with them at the time it was defaced. The IP address of the website on June 29 according to Zone-H.org was 192.185.44.88, which is one connected to HostGator. The records for the domain name were changed on July 4, which is probably when the web hosting was changed.

We don’t know what the cause of this is. It could be that the person or persons behind the Mr.ToKeiChun69 defacements is only targeting EIG hosted websites, has been unsuccessful in targeting websites at other web hosts, or only notifying Zone-H.org of websites hosted with EIG. What would seem more likely is that they are taking advantage of some security issue in EIG’s systems.

To be clear we don’t think that this is an inside job.

We notified the person that contacted us about the correlation, which they hopefully will pass along to BlueHost.

A Single Tweet Nicely Sums Up the Problem With WordPress Allowing SiteLock to Be Involved With WordCamps

The web security company SiteLock has a well earned reputation that can be summed up with what Google suggests when you type in their name:

Google's second suggestion is "sitelock scams".

That obviously isn’t a reputation you would think that any company would want. It would probably be difficult for SiteLock to legitimately change it though since their business model seems to be based around the activity that gets them labeled as such.

It would also be difficult because if they, for example, stopped partnering with web host to try to get people to pay them to clean up hacked website that are not in fact hacked, then they would actually have to really clean up websites to get paid and from everything we have seen they are even worse than the average web security company, which is already quite bad, when doing that. For example, we are often brought in to re-clean hacked websites after some other company had previously had done that and then the website got hacked again. While that isn’t always their fault, in almost every instance we have been told that the determining how the website was hacked never even came up, despite trying to do that that being a basic part of the cleanup and important to make sure the vulnerability that allowed the website to be hacked has been fixed. That is certainly something we have seen with SiteLock. What we haven’t seen with other companies is that SiteLock has caused websites to be broken after doing their work.

Instead of trying to change, SiteLock looks to have focused on various efforts to present a public face very different than the one that their customers and not always willing potential customers can find themselves dealing with. What looks to be an important component of that effort is their involvement and sponsorship in the conferences for WordPress, WordCamps, which uses money they have gotten from their questionable business practices. We think a tweet put out by one of those WordCamps succinctly shows what the problem with WordPress allowing that to occur is:

The claim that SiteLock wants make your WordPress secure is belied by many things we have run across, including a few recent examples: thinking that leaving malicious code on a website for a while is not a threat, not taking the actions needed to prevent hacked websites from being reinfected, and not warning about vulnerable plugins or insuring they are being kept up to date on a website they are supposed to be keeping secure. But maybe the most troubling recent example is that SiteLock is still knowingly spreading false information about the security of the core WordPress software and using it to make a profit. We would love to hear from someone on the WordPress or WordCamp side of things how that makes anyone’s WordPress secure.

At some point, maybe we have already reached that point, you have to say that WordPress is complicit in what is going on here. Back in September of last year we contacted the central WordCamp organization to let them know that about the issues with SiteLock and ask for a comment about the situation or a more general comment on any restrictions on who can be a sponsor. We never got any response from them, though it was pretty clear they saw the message. So it seems that they can’t actually justify what is going on, but are still willing take money SiteLock has gotten through less than above board business activity. We later left a comment on a blog post about SiteLock on the WordCamp US’ website, shortly afterwards the comments left on that post were removed and commenting was disabled, so there does seem to an effort to hide what is going on.

What could explain some of why they continue to allow SiteLock’s participation is that SiteLock’s owners don’t just sponsor WordCamps under the SiteLock brand, but also through brands of the web hosting company Endurance International Group, which they run. For example, at WordCamp Europe they were a higher level sponsor through EIG brands Bluehost and MOJO Marketplace (MOJO Marketplace also doesn’t seem to be too concerned about security):

iPage Provides Conflicting and Bad Advice on Cleaning Hacked Websites

When it comes to dealing with a hacked website, the advice you are going to get from a web host isn’t necessarily very good. For example, we have often seen them tell people their websites must have been hacked due to outdated software, without the web host having done anything to determine if that was true (and in some cases despite the website not even using outdated software). In one recent instance we found that one of the brands of the web hosting company Endurance International Group, JustHost, was pointing toward an outdated version of Joomla as the source of hack, while they were offering to install that version on websites despite support for it ending over two years before. Since the installation occurred through another Endurance brand, MOJO Marketplace, it looks like that version probably being offered for install across their other brands as well.

With that that type of thing happening at Endurance, it might not be surprising to see what we recently came across while doing a consultation with someone with a hacked website using one of their other brands, iPage, in which they provided conflicting and bad advice on dealing with a hacked website.

Here was is most of the original email they sent to their customer about a hacked website:

During a routine scan, we detected suspicious contents that suggest your ‘[redacted]’ account has been compromised. We have temporarily suspended your website to protect your website visitors from getting impacted and also preventing the impact on your website reputation as well as our server’s reputation.

We have uploaded a file ‘websitescan.txt’ within the stats directory of your account which contains the full list of infected files. We need you to take one of two actions suggested below:

Please follow the steps given below to remove the infected contents on your own:
1. Open the ‘websitescan.txt’ file through your FileManager (OR use ‘FTP’ software like FileZilla).
2. Clean or remove each of the listed files.
3. You can also upload a clean copy of web files from your local backup.

Alternatively, we encourage you to contact our preferred partner, SiteLock. In addition to long-term solutions like their Fix and Prevent products, which offer daily scans and removal of malware, SiteLock also provides an emergency service, SiteLock 911. You can call our dedicated SiteLock support representatives using the Toll Free number (United States and Canada customers only): (855) 378 6200. International: +1 415 390-2500. To learn more about SiteLock, please go to: https://www.ipage.com/product/sitelock

So in that email they recommend simply cleaning/removing or replacing the files they identified.

When they refer to SiteLock as their preferred partner what they really mean they are getting paid a lot of money to push their services (SiteLock’s owners also happen to run Endurance International Group).

In a follow up email they had these recommendations:

Please remove the malicious contents or replace the infected files with a clean copy of web files from your local backup.

Our best recommendation is to completely remove all the files from the account and restore the contents from a known clean backup. An alternative would be going through a company such as SiteLock to clean and secure all scripts. If this isn’t done and the malicious files that are found through scanning are simply removed, the vulnerability will still exist and you will encounter the files again and again.

Those two paragraphs seem to conflict with each other as the second one states that if “the malicious files that are found through scanning are simply removed, the vulnerability will still exist and you will encounter the files again and again”, but the first paragraph and the first email suggest doing just that.

The larger problem with this is that whether you were to “completely remove all the files from the account and restore the contents from a known clean backup” or remove the indicated files that isn’t going to resolve the vulnerability. The malicious code in files on the website had to get there somehow, so there must be something that allowed that and you would need to fix that. To be sure you had fixed it, instead of just guessing that you had, you would need to figure out how the website was hacked in the first place. Nowhere in the emails do they suggest doing those things and those are things their “preferred partner” SiteLock usually doesn’t do based on everything we have seen with them.

A Nexus of Insecurity Between EIG, SiteLock, and MOJO Marketplace

Last year as we started hearing and seeing more and more complaints about the web security SiteLock one thing we wondered was why would web hosting companies continue to partner with a company that was harming their reputation. The answer is in part that they get a lot of money from SiteLock, the Endurance International Group (EIG) has disclosed to investors that they get 55 of the revenue from SiteLock services through their partnership. When you are talking about $300 for a hack cleanup or $100 a month for a protection service, their cut of that could easily be more than they are getting paid by the customer for the service they are actually providing (without the costs that come with actually providing something).

That wasn’t the only explanation for that particular partnership, as turns out that the majority owners of SiteLock are also the CEO and a board member of EIG. While EIG isn’t all the well known by that name, they provide web hosting under a number of well known brands including A Small Orange, Bluehost, FatCow, HostGator, iPage, IPOWER, JustHost and quite a few others.

Web hosts can play an important role in keeping websites secure. They have a responsibility to keep the things in their power secure and they can also do things that help their customers do their part. The type of partnership that SiteLock has with EIG could influence EIG to not take the steps they could to keep websites secure since they can potentially make so much money off websites they host getting hacked. While we would think that might impact them doing extra things to help their customers, it turns out that EIG is not doing something that is their responsibility.

We are currently working on a cleanup of a hacked website hosted with JustHost, where JustHost and SiteLock have pointed to an outdated Joomla installation as being a weakness. While looking around at things we found that JustHost is currently offering to install that version of Joomla, despite it having not been supported for over two years.

From the JustHost cPanel control panel clicking the One-Click Installs button took us to https://www.mojomarketplace.com/scripts. The company behind that website, MOJO Marketplace, is another EIG company, which among other things provides the ability to install various software on websites. Looking over that page we found that not only were they offering to install the version of Joomla, 2.5.28, that JustHost and SiteLock were pointing to as being a weakness, but they are offering plenty of other outdated and insecure software. Below we have highlighted some of those.

If we were not already well aware of what SiteLock is really about, we would asking why SiteLock would be partnered with a web hosting company putting their customer at risk like this. It is worth noting that as far as we are aware none of SiteLock’s protection services include updating software, despite that being an important measure (and them seeming to be aware of the risk of outdated software).

Joomla

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Joomla 2.5.28

First up MOJO Marketplace is still offering Joomla 2.5.x despite that reaching end of life (EOL) on December 31st, 2014.

MOJO Marketplace is Installing  Joomla 3.6.4

The next release of 3.x, 3.6.5, was released on December 13 of last year and included security fixes.

Drupal

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Drupal 6.33

Not only has Drupal 6 been EOL over year ago, but there were five security updates after 6.33: 6.34, 6.35, 6.36, 6.37 and 6.38.

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Drupal 7.43

The next release of Drupal 7, 7.44, was released 11 months ago. Not only did that include security fixes, but so did the subsequent 7.52.

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Drupal 8.1.0

The next release of Drupal 8, 8.1.1 was released a year ago. Subsequent to that there have three releases with security fixes: 8.1.3 8.1.7, and 8.3.1.

Magento

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Magento 1.9.1.0

That version is two years out of date, with 1.9.1.1 being released in May, 2015. That version included security fixes, as did 7 subsequent versions: 1.9.2.0, 1.9.2.1, 1.9.2.2, 1.9.2.3, 1.9.3.0, 1.9.3.1, and 1.9.3.2.

PrestaShop

MOJO Marketplace is Installing PrestaShop 1.6.1.4

The PrestaShop version is more than a year out of date, 1.6.1.5 was released last April, and a security fix was released in the subsequent 1.6.1.12.

Moodle

MOJO Marketplace is Installing Moodle 3.0.4

Moodle 3.0.x was replaced as the most recent major version of Moodle just about a year ago. Support for 3.0.x ended a week ago. Not surprisingly the version of 3.0.x being offered isn’t recent, with the next version 3.0.5, being released 11 months ago. That version included security fixes as well five subsequent releases: 3.0.6, 3.0.7, 3.0.8, 3.0.9, and 3.0.10.

MediaWiki

MOJO Marketplace is Installing MediaWiki 12.3.6

MOJO Marketplace isn’t offering the latest major version of MediaWiki, but at least you could explain providing 1.23.x as it long term support release in they were keeping it up to date. But as with the other software they are not doing that. The next release of 1.23.x, 1.23.7, was released in November of 2014. That was a security release, as were 8 subsequent releases: 1.23.8, 1.23.9, 1.23.10, 1.23.11, 1.23.12, 1.23.14, 1.23.15, and 1.23.16. Version 1.23.x reaches EOL this month.

Site5 Referring to SiteLock as a Third Party Seems Disingenuous At Best

As we have looked closer at the web security company SiteLock over the last year one of the things that has stuck out is how their web hosting partners are not being upfront about the nature of their partnership with SiteLock.

As we have mentioned before when it comes to one of their biggest web hosting partners, Endurance International Group (EIG), the company has disclosed to investors that SiteLock not only pays them more than half fees for services sold through their partnership, but the CEO and a board of EIG also are the major owners of SiteLock. Those seem like things that should be disclosed to their customers as well since there is an obvious potential for conflict of interest with that relationship, for which their customers should be aware of when considering their recommendations regarding SiteLock. Instead we have found previously that one EIG brand, HostGator, wouldn’t even publicly acknowledge those connections. In that instance they referred to SiteLock simply as a “trusted partner”.

We are frequently contacted by people that have had their web host shut down access to the website based on a claim that the website is hacked and recommend that they hire SiteLock to handle resolve the situation. While in many instances the websites are in fact hacked, there are some serious issues with false claims that websites are hacked. So when we are contacted in those situations we want to find out what evidence there is that the website is hacked first, so that we can double check if the website is in fact hacked before starting on a cleanup. Through that we were recently forwarded a report from the web host Site5 (about a website that was actually hacked), which referred to SiteLock is this way:

If you don’t feel comfortable removing the infected files yourself, we recommend contacting a third party professional who can assist with removing malware, such as SiteLock.

Considering that Site5 has been part of EIG for nearly a year and the connection between EIG and SiteLock, calling them a third party, while maybe technically accurate, clearly doesn’t provide their customers a honest understanding of the connection between the companies. (Not surprisingly from everything else we have seen related to EIG, the quality of Site5 service and support looks to have gone downhill since becoming part of EIG, just look at the number of negative reviews they have received on their BBB page since the purchase).

SiteLock and Bluehost Falsely Claimed a Website Contained Malware Due to SiteLock’s Poor Scanner

When it comes to the web security company SiteLock, one of the frequent complaints is that they and their web hosting partners falsely claim that websites have malware on them. After that happens the web hosting company frequently suspends access to the website and pushes the customer to hire SiteLock to clean up not existent malware. We thought it would be useful to look at an example of this we were recently consulted on, as those dealing with the possibility of a false claim should know a number of things when dealing with it.

This situation involved the web host Bluehost. Bluehost is one of many brands the company Endurance International Group (EIG) does business under. Some other major ones are A Small Orange, FatCow, HostGator, iPage,  IPOWER, and JustHost. The company’s web hosting brands are very open about having a partnership with SiteLock, what they have, at least in the past, refused to acknowledge publicly is that partnership involves EIG getting 55 percent of revenue for SiteLock services sold through that partnership (that information was disclosed to investors). That obviously raises some serious questions and it probably explains in large part a lot of the problems that arise from that partnership. What they also don’t disclose to their customers is that the majority owners of SiteLock are also a member of the board and the CEO of EIG, so they are well aware of SiteLock’s practices.

What we have repeatedly said is that if you get contacted by SiteLock or one of their web hosting partners claiming that the website is infected or otherwise is hacked, is that should not ignore it. While there are plenty of situations like the one discussed here where there is a false claim, the claim is also often true. For a hacked website, the longer you wait to do properly clean it up, the bigger the problem can be. Instead we recommend that you first get any information that SiteLock and or the web host will provide and then get a second opinion as to whether the website is hacked. We are always happy to provide that and we would hope that other security companies would as well (when someone contacts us about a hacked website we always make sure it is actually hacked before taking on a cleanup).

One of the reasons for getting a second opinion is that someone familiar with hacked websites should understand how to easily check the validity of the claims made. While someone not familiar with the situation might try doing checks that won’t necessarily be very useful. In this situation one the things the website’s owner did was to download a copy of the website’s files and run them through a malware scanner. That likely is going to fail to identify many files that contain malicious code because a malware scanner for a computer isn’t designed to detect those files (our experience is that scanners designed to scan website files don’t produce great results either).

When we were provided the information that the website’s owner had received, the first element that caught our eye was this result of SiteLock’s malware scanner:

What was shown was rather odd as the malware scanner claimed to have detected a defacement hack (labeled as “SiteLock-PHP-HACKEDBY-klw”), which isn’t malware. So at best the scanner was incorrectly labeling a hacked website as containing malware, when it had a different issue.

More problematic is that it looks like they might are flagging websites as being defaced just because they have text that says “hacked by” something. That could produce some rather bad false positives, since this post itself could be claimed to contain malware simply by using that phrase. They also mark that detection as having a severity of “Urgent”, despite that.

So was the website defaced as that scan seemed to indicate? The website was taken down by the point we were contacted, which wouldn’t need to be done just because there was a defacement and makes it harder for someone else to check over things (whether intentional or not, it seems like something that makes it easier to push someone to hire SiteLock to resolve the issue). Looking at the Google cache of the website’s homepage though, we were able to see what happened.

The website’s page contains a section that shows RSS feeds items from other websites. One of those websites had been impacted by a vulnerability in outdated versions of WordPress that allowed defacing posts and the results of that defacement was showing on this website:

That “hacked by” text on showing there didn’t mean this website was infected with malware or otherwise hacked and the website didn’t pose any threat. That is something that anyone from Bluehost or SiteLock familiar with hacked websites should have spotted by looking over the website for a few seconds, but clearly that didn’t happen, even when they suspended access to the website. Both of them have an incentive to not check to make sure the website is hacked, since they have monetary interest in selling security services in this situation even though they are not needed. As we mentioned recently it appears that when you are in contact with SiteLock you are dealing with a commissioned sales person, not a technical person, so they might not even understand what is actually going on either (one situation we looked at recently would strongly seem to indicate that as a possibility).

Looking at the files that Bluehost had listed as being infected, they were just cached copies of the content from the website that had the RSS feed section in them. So there wasn’t any malware in them.

It also seems that no one from Bluehost or SiteLock bothered to contact the other website to let them know that there website was actually hacked, seeing as it was quickly fixed after we notified them of the issue they had.

At this point the website’s owner is planning to move to a new web host, which doesn’t seem like a bad idea (we think that people should avoid web hosts that have partnered with SiteLock even if they have yet to run into this type of situation).

HostGator Is Actively Hiding the True Nature of Their Partnership With SiteLock

When it comes the really bad practices of the web security company SiteLock, they often involve their partnership with various web hosts. Considering that long ago we had seen that SiteLock didn’t seem to very good at handling security, whether it be not properly cleaning up hacked websites or not doing a basic security check before declaring a website secure, we had long assumed that these partnerships were not based on the web hosts believing that SiteLock was the best company to best help their customers, but instead based on the web hosts being paid to push their services. Those payments, it turns out, are happening, but they tell only part of the story of the partnerships with some of the web hosts.

Last month while looking for some other information about SiteLock we can across the fact that the companies majority owners also are the CEO and a board member of the web hosting company Endurance International Group. That companies does business under the brand names A Small Orange, Bluehost, FatCow, HostGator, HostMonster, iPage, IPOWER, and many more.

Through that we also found that in the case of Endurance International Group, not only were they getting paid for the sales of SiteLock services through the partnership, but they were receiving a majority of the fees as of fiscal year 2014.

In the case of both of those facts, they were disclosed to investors, the ownership is disclosed in financials statements and the fee breakdown was disclosed in a prepared remarks for an earning conference call. To the public those things have not been disclosed in the normal course of business. And a recent interaction we had with HostGator support on twitter show that isn’t just that they don’t go out of the way to disclose them, but are actively trying to hide those facts.

The interaction starts with this tweet from HostGator Support to a customer of theirs that doesn’t mention either of those items as reason why they are partnered or “suggest” SiteLock:

Its worth noting that when it comes to cleaning up a hacked websites, you would do things the same way no matter the web host, so working well with their service is explanation that doesn’t make much sense for hack cleanups. It also worth noting, as we did before, that HostGator doesn’t make it easy to properly clean up hacked website since log files are not stored for a sufficient amount of time be default. If this was a real partnership and SiteLock actually properly cleaned up hacked websites, we would expect that issue would have been resolved a long time ago.

We sent a reply to their customer mentioning the CEO connection:

In turn HostGator starts to obfuscate (due to the limits of tweet length our tweet had not had made the distinction that the CEO in question, was of Endurance International Group, but it is clear in the linked post)

We then sent a reply clarifying that and they replied:

At that point we said that we hope they would start to disclose the true nature of their partnership:

Which in turn lead stating they could not confirm that, despite those being facts that their parent company has already confirmed (otherwise we wouldn’t know them):

At this point, they claim they can’t confirm they are getting paid:

It is one thing for them to not mention what is going in the normal course of business, but to actual being unwillingly to tell the truth is pretty telling as to what is going on.

The conversation ended after we pointed out that we were not asking them to confirm anything, just disclose what we both already know to be true:

What To Do If You Get Contacted by HostGator or SiteLock About a Hacked Website

One of the bad practices we have seen from SiteLock is to claim that website are hacked when they are not, so if you get contacted by either of them with claim that the website is hacked you should get a second opinion. We are always happy to provide a free consultation on how to best deal with a hacked website, which includes double checking as to whether the reason the website is believed to be hacked does in fact make sense (often times other issues are confused with actually hacking issues and that can usually easily recognized by someone who deals with hacked website on a regular basis).

Considering how bad of a job SiteLock has been doing with cleaning hacked websites as of just the last month and their bad practices you would probably be best off avoiding them when you are dealing with a hacked website. You also might want to consider moving to a web host that doesn’t partner with SiteLock, as that partnership seems like it is pretty clear warning of how they treat their customers and a lack of concern for security.

So SiteLock Is Now Apparently Blaming Their Web Hosting Partners For Their Bad Practices

One of things that we had wondered for some time about SiteLock, the web security company that seems like is scamming their customers, was what explained their partnerships with so many web hosts. Before we found about the more scam level stuff going on with them, what we had see was they seemed to be quite bad at hack cleanups and the basics of website security. So we figured that the partnerships were not based on the web host believing that SiteLock was the best choice to help their customers, but about money. When we found about how SiteLock was taking advantage of people on large scale we started to wonder how much money must the web hosts being getting to continue those partnerships, considering that their partnerships with SiteLock couldn’t be good for their reputation. To a lesser degree we sometimes have had wondered why SiteLock was partnering with some web hosting companies that had some bad security practices or were making it harder to properly clean up hacked websites. We figured that they would at least be pushing these companies to improve those situations, but we saw no evidence of that occurring.

Several weeks back we ran across a couple of things that went a long way to answering those questions.

First, it turns out the majority owners of SiteLock are also the CEO and board member of a major web hosting company Endurance International Group, which does business under the brand names A Small Orange, Bluehost, FatCow, HostGator, HostMonster, iPage, IPOWER, and many more. That would seem to make it easier to get them to partner with SiteLock. From this we also know that at least at those web hosts, the web hosts are not in the dark about what SiteLock is actually doing and if they had a problem with it they could make a change directly at SiteLock. It also goes a long way to explaining why SiteLock wasn’t insisting on better security practices at web hosts, since their owners are also running a web hosting company that doesn’t have the best handle on security.

It important to note that neither SiteLock or the Endurance International Group is upfront about this connection between the two. The only place you will find out about the connection is in Endurance International Group financial reports, where they are legally required to disclose it. Even in those it hidden away, as SiteLock is not mentioned in them, instead they are referred to by the entity that owns them, Innovative Business Services. At the point where you legal are required to disclose something, it seems to us that would be a good indication that you should be upfront with your customers about what is going on, but clearly they don’t fell the same way.

Second, it turns out that web hosting partners are getting a lot of money, if the deal that SiteLock has with Endurance International Group is any indication. As of fiscal year 2014 the Endurance got 55% of the revenue coming from sales through the partnership with SiteLock. We wonder how people that have been strongly pushed to SiteLock by their web hosts would feel when they found how much money the web host is getting by doing that, especially in situation where they are dealing with a hacked websites. It also appears to create an incentive for them to not make sure their clients are secure, since they can make a lot of money off of those websites being hacked.

That brings up to the latest piece of information we ran across about their partnerships, which is that SiteLock is apparently blaming their web hosting partners for how the services are sold. Here is a tweet from one of the writers at WP Tavern:

Assuming that is true and we don’t have a reason to believe that it isn’t (the same person did a podcast interview with a SiteLock representative in June, in which their response to a question of SiteLock’s unsavory practices was that you should trust that person that it isn’t happening (despite it actually happening)), it is a rather outlandish claim. Even if you didn’t know what we just discussed, what kind of partnership would it be where one party has no control of how their services are being sold.

In reality from everything we have read and heard, SiteLock employees are the ones doing much of what is being complained about. Even if they were not, considering how much the web host is getting paid, it doesn’t seem believable that Sitelock wouldn’t have the leverage to stop bad practices.

More importantly in the case of Bluehost, that was mentioned in the previous tweet there, seeing as SiteLock’s owner also control Bluehost, they wouldn’t’ have a problem controlling how the web host sells SiteLock’s services.

We get the feeling that the idea here is that SiteLock and the web hosts each point the figure at the other and hope that more people don’t become aware that they are dealing with two parties so closely connected.