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Tech & Services

FireHost’s hacker-protection plan puts company to test

Starting in December 2008, Dallas-based web host FireHost began offering hacker protection. According to the company’s president, Chris Drake, there was a definite need to create a stronger defense system. On FireHost’s blog, it points to a video by security vendor, Sophos, who also claims that 16,000 new websites get attacked each day. With those staggering numbers, the security service FireHost provides seems to differentiate itself from all other competitors.

In fact, I couldn’t find any other managed host provider with this level of dedicated security available to small or medium sized businesses. FireHost considers security an integral part of hosting for all its customers. All packages feature beefed up security, including a heavy-duty firewall by Imperva. Now partnered with McAfee, FireHost unveiled its hacker-protection plan. This security scanning application works undercover on your site as a daily preventative service. If your site is a victim of hacking attacks, you’ll receive a notification.

But do you really need it? FireHost thinks so. This managed host provider is currently offering complimentary hacker reports of your small to medium sized business website. Simply go to their site, and input your information to see where or if your site is vulnerable to nasty attacks like SQL injection, DOS, Cross Site Scripting, Session Hijacking, Cookie Tampering, or Probes.

Sounds great, right? Not exactly. Let’s not forget Geeks.com which, while proudly carrying the McAfee Secure logo, was still hacked last January, by a Cross Site Scripting attack. Hackers had access to sensitive information, like credit cards. Hopefully, within the last year, McAfee has worked on this vulnerability, but the saying goes to not put all your eggs in one basket. Although FireHost may be offering great ideas, it’s a good idea to diversify your security, instead of relying on one host to provide all your security needs.

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Discussion

2 comments for “FireHost’s hacker-protection plan puts company to test”

  1. Thank you Jacqueline for the blog post.

    We’ve contacted geeks.com to learn if they we’re truly protecting their website or just having the McAfee Secure logo. We’re protecting all traffic over port 80 and 443 and have partnered with McAfee and other vulnerability scanners to test applications behind our security zone as that’s the only true way to test the web application directly.

    Regardless of how a hosting environment is setup, what we found is it’s crucial for security engineers and the application developers to collaborate about their application and tighten down the screws as much as possible.

    I look forward to reading more articles from you!

    Posted by Chris Drake | Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 11:27 pm
  2. I think that no hosting company can protect themselves from hackers. If a hacker wants to hack into the accounts of clients, they will. You can patch up a security breach just until the hacker finds a new way in. All you can do as a hosting company is provide extremely frequent backups (daily would be best).

    Posted by Web Hosting | Tuesday, November 2, 2010, 9:37 am

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