Network Solutions was hacked exactly 7 days ago, almost to the minute. It was a group called the 'Islamic Ghosts Team', and they replaced every single 'index.*' file with their own throughout the organization, for which my sites are also hosted. Almost 20 of them. I was in the unique position to look at one of my sites, and less than 30 minutes later, discover the hack. I immediately attempted to restore a backup from my Network Solutions control panel, but received an error. I then placed a work order with Network Solutions to have an engineer mitigate the issue, and respond to me when completed. All of this occured within an hour of the attack. I called daily for status checks. I was constantly assured the team was working on fixing the hack, and restoring the sites. On (my) Friday (4 days later) I called with some degree of nervousness, but was again assured that my case was a priority and it would be fixed within 24 hours. So now, it's 7 days. There are no good backups left, due to a 7th day replacement schedule. They have done nothing. I have been a client of the company for over 20 years, and supposedly have VIP Status. Apparently that means nothing. They have done nothing, I have no good backups, and I have started to manually restore the sites to normal. I can not in good conscious recommend Network Solutions for Hosting. They have severely disappointed me. Most of the stuff isn't a problem. It's annoying, but it can be fixed. However, the lack of action, lack of communication (other than those phone calls I initiated) and the lack of ability to self-restore albeit supposedly available methods, lead me to regard NetSol as just another corporate entity whose policy is a detriment to client service, not an asset. Buyer Beware. Cheers! -- Smug

Lets build our own server!!!! So sorry you are going through this too. I literally am feeling your pain 7 days of hell..... coincidence? Perhaps it is my Army intuition but I think this is a bit bigger than we all realize....but then again I do live on the Idaho border and it is it my unfortunate genetic makeup to jump on the conspiracy theory band wagon from time to to time. Can I ask if you are using wordpress? I am finding a lot of my stuff coming through that. Recommended to go to use concrete5 and cloudflare from this day forward..... I still think building a server on the buzztouch tour bus is our answer! -Hope you get it fixed -Sheri

That sucks. 20 year's. I would be upset. I hope things work out.

I use Joomla for the most part. And fortunately the attack wasn't 'malicious' so much as it was annoying. So I have to run around and replace a bunch of default Joomla index.php files; not a 'biggie', but annoying none the less. However, it was 'supposed' to be a 'one-click' restore, and failing that, the engineers should have taken care of it. If it's not going to work as advertised, what am I paying for? Had I known 'their' backups weren't going to mean anything, I would (and now am) have taken steps to safeguard my data, and more importantly, my client data. I used to host my own servers, but the Guam infrastructure just isn't as robust as what is available elsewhere. Which is quite ironic, considering 7 pacific intercontinental telecom cables terminate here. We directly connect to Japan, Australia, Korea, Japan, Hawaii, California, and the Philippines. Unbelievable. But the view is nice. :) Cheers! -- Smug

Sorry to hear about this Smug. Keep us up to date on the outcome of all of this.

@Smug, I'm going to email you. Islamic Ghosts Team hacked my server too about 5 years ago and replaced all of my index files. The good news is: they have not touched any of your files other than index (out of my knowledge of what they do). They run a script to find any index files, so even in obscure folders, all of your indexes would have been changed. Another bit of good news: they do it to show off, they don't do it as maliciously as it looks, and they apparently do not steal any data or take anything, they literally do it for fun. A-holes. I left my host after it happened to me (vodahost/bluevoda), horrible service (they even managed to hack the host and change all of their index files too). I still have a few of their hacked index files somewhere in backups. Moved to hostgator. Never looked back. Hope you get your site(s) back up and running soon. David

That is pretty surprising for a company that was essentially the backbone of the internet for well over a decade. That Network Solutions brand used to have some value. But this is why they lost their monopoly on being the only domain registar - they were not able to keep up and provide adequete service. IMO it all really changed when they entered the hosting market and got even worse when they rolled out Hosted Exchange and all that SEO stuff. Personally I don't think any host is better than another. Web hosting is simply file space, maybe a sql database and a few entries in a virtual host record. I do full site backups of data and seperate database back-ups so that I can move the entire thing to a new host if needed. The real trick is keeping that on a schedule so you have current data when you need it. Bummer to hear your situation but your post is a good reminder it's time to login and make some back-ups of my own!

I have them too for my site and disability blog. I haven't seen anything hacked. How difficult would it be to move my disability blog on network solutions to another one without loosing any content? Disability blog uses wp. LA