His website has been successfully compromised and defaced by blackhat hackers four times in the past. Mitnick recognizes that his high-profile and the nature of his security consulting business make protecting his websites a challenge, but he feels confident in our ability to lockdown his server and provide custom, secure hosting solutions tailored to his needs.

“I’ve made it clear to every hosting company that’s ever approached me that protecting my sites from hackers is an extraordinary job. FireHost is the only secure hosting company able to show me that they actually do have the goods to get the job done,” said Kevin Mitnick. “I feel confident with this decision and hope I won’t ever again have to deal with my sites being attacked in such a way.”

Our CEO and founder, Chris Drake goes on to say, “There are two kinds of hackers in the world, the egomaniacs that  deface high profile people like Kevin Mitnick and the malicious hackers who go after confidential data en masse. FireHost is the only secure hosting company that’s protecting companies from both and Mitnick recognizes this. We know we have a challenge in front of us, but feel very confident in our ability to offer the best protection available.”

$ whois mitnicksecurity.com

MITNICKSECURITY.COM.HACKED.BY.NERD.FROM.WEB-HACK.COM
MITNICKSECURITY.COM

In a phone conversation today, Mitnick disclosed to FireHost’s Chief Security Officer that he was using secure hosting practices on his site, but the hackers got to his website through his hosting company’s DNS provider. They compromised the control panel for his domain names and redirected his site to a defaced version.

FireHost’s CSO responded to the event, “DNS security has been a hot button since last summer’s poisoning attack discovered by Dan Kaminsky. Mitnick’s attack was much more straight forward, and this is an example of why we don’t rely on third party providers to secure our customers. By maintaining the infrastructure in-house, we can help ensure the integrity and security of our customers’ web sites.”

We reached out to Lance James, CTO of Secure Science and author of Phishing Exposed for a comment on how he recommends protecting website from a similar attack. Lance says part of the answer is partnering with a secure web host that can provide protection from DNS vulnerabilities.

“Control Panel software has a history of successful attacks, and it is not surprising that a high-profile site such as mitnicksecurity.com is susceptible to vulnerabilities. His site is a natural target, and unfortunately, it can be extremely embarrassing when an expert in security chooses a hosting provider with such vulnerabilities,” Lance James.