Hackers gain access to sensitive data from 100,000 websites

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June 9th, 2009 - Posted by Joe

A UK-based web hosting company is reporting that data from as many as 100,000 websites hosted on it's servers was destroyed as a result of vulnerabilities in a software program used by many web hosts.

Hackers were able to gain very high levels of access to a large number of sites hosted at web host Vaserv.com by hacking a common software utility used by many such web hosting companies. Officials for the company estimated that about 50% of the impacted websites didn't not have any type of data backup and, therefore, are likely lost completely. Vaserv.com technicians are actively working to restore the remaining impacted websites.

It is also believed that hackers had direct access to sensitive personal information stored on Vaserv.com's servers. This data breach is likely to have worldwide impact given the international nature of the Internet and sheer number of websites impacted.

To learn more about how to protect your identity following such data breaches, visit our comparison and reviews of identity theft protection services. To get more details on steps you can take to prevent documents and files on your personal computer from falling victim to hackers and experiencing such data loss, visit our comparisons of Internet security software and online backup services.