Who builds your website is very important but who hosts your website can be just as important. You want your website to be up and running for you while at the same time being safeguarded from external threats. The latter is a never ending process of guarding against cyber thieves and criminals. Have you given a second thought to who hosts the websites that you own?
If you haven’t you should
What Can Good Hosting Do For You?
Using a reputable hosting service like Nicely Done Hosting can make all the difference when it comes to your website. Reputable hosting services will work to make sure that your website is up and running as close to 100% as possible while at the same time keeping the people who should not be able to access your site from accessing your site.
Deer.io
Deer.io was a Shopify-like platform that was used to host online stores that allowed hackers to advertise and sell hacked accounts and user information. The man who ran the service, a Russian national named Kirill Victorovich Firsov claimed to run a legitimate service and the service had been active since October 2013.
The good news is that no legitimate sites were hosted on this platform, all of the 250 online stores hosted were used for one form of cybercrime or another. The information that was sold included access to hacked servers, hacked accounts, and personal information like Social Security numbers, birthdates and home addresses.
The Heart Of Cyber Crime
The FBI was able to make several purchases of the above information and found out that it was legitimate information. The site by then was well known to the Feds and other cyber security experts because an online user used MySpace and LinkedIn to advertise personal information for sale. A reporter also contacted Deer.io to have some questions answered only to have the representative (believed to be Firsov) flaunt his Russian nationality and claimed that what he was doing was not against the laws of the Russian Federation.
At the time of that interview Deer.io’s mission was not really known. When looking at the Deer.io it looked just like a Russian version of Spotify or even Wix. It allowed customers to build their own sites and to provide hosting services. The problem was the clientele, which advertised their services on the dark web and included known cyber criminals and even ISIS. All told more than 24,000 shops were hosted by Deer.io
No Extradition
The problem for Firsov was that what he was doing did violate the laws of the United States but he would have to be caught in the US or at least a country with an extradition treaty. The FBI got its chance on March 7 when Firsov was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He was arraigned in a New York court and charged with aiding and abetting of trafficking and trafficking of stolen information.
Cyber Criminals Will Change Tactics
Who hosts your website is important. You are running a legitimate website so you would not be attracted to Deer.io but if more of these “hosting services” are taken down (this was not the first) it may lead to some of these offering legitimate hosting services to actually cover their criminal activity. That could lead to some excellent deals that might seem too good to pass up.
Do your research. Do you want your website to be hosted out of a foreign country (like Russia or Ukraine) and do you know who is hosting it? That company will have access to your site and all of the information held within. No, instead using a hosting service based in the US is a better option and finding a hosting service could be as easy as asking your web developer.
At Nicely Done Sites we can not only build your website for you but we can also host it as well with Nicely Done Hosting. We offer competitive pricing and a maintenance agreement that will help to keep your site up to date with updates to keep bad actors out. Who hosts your website is important and you don’t need to look any further than Nicely Done Hosting for your Nicely Done Site.