Hackers hacked Europe's largest hosting provider LeaseWeb

Europe's largest hosting provider LeaseWeb was hacked by a group of hackers calling themselves KDMS Team. As the attackers stated, they managed to gain access to the data of the company’s clients.

On October 5, a stub appeared on the main page of the hosting provider LeaseWeb, one of the largest in Europe. On it, hackers reported hacking the company's DNS servers and gaining access to the data of its clients.

The day after the incident, LeaseWeb said that the damage caused by the cybercriminals turned out to be superficial, and its customers' data did not fall into the hands of third parties. The company keeps user information separate from publicly accessible servers as a security measure, and LeaseWeb has seen no indication that the data was accessed from outside the public as a result of the incident, the hosting company said.

On the afternoon of Monday, October 7, the official LeaseWeb website was unavailable, after which it returned to its previous mode of operation.

LeaseWeb, whose office is based in Amsterdam, has data centers in the USA and Germany. Among its largest clients are companies such as Heineken, Starbucks and Kaspersky Lab. Last April, LeaseWeb took an initiative in the fight against cybercrime by sponsoring the non-profit organization StopBadware. They also fund the Wikimedia Foundation.

LeaseWeb also stored data from the file-sharing service Megaupload on their servers. After the American authorities closed the site itself, the provider stored user information for another year and then deleted it, freeing up resources for other clients. Then Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom accused the company of destroying petabytes of user information without warning. LeaseWeb, in turn, stated that they stored the data at their own expense, but no one showed interest in it during the downtime.