An ex-employee has hacked into the web hosting services of
Hostgator, the company announced recently. Eric Gunnar Gisse, the former employee at the center of Hostgator’s hacking issue, allegedly added ‘backdoor’ access to Hostgator’s network which gave him ‘unfettered control’ over around 2,700 of the company’s servers.
Mr. Gisse, aged 29, was employed by Hostgator as a medium-level administrator from September 2011 until his dismissal on February 15, 2012. After his dismissal, Hostgator alleged that Mr. Gisse had utilized a backdoor access technique known as 'PCRE' which enabled him to log in to servers in a number of distant locations, including the Hetzner Data Center in Nuremberg, Germany. To do this he had put a Hostgator electronic SSH key under his own control.
Despite his efforts HostGator suggests there is little evidence that Mr. Gisse had accessed any data on the company’s servers. "He did not actually retrieve customer information," explained Hostgator’s COO Patrick Pelanne. "We detected (the hacking issue) long before he had any opportunity to get into any of that."
Charged with violating computer system security by the Harris County, Texas district attorney's office, prosecutors suggested Mr. Gisse of San Antonio, Texas had utilized a Unix administration program to hide his backdoor access from Hostgator management. He is scheduled to appear in court over the coming months and is currently being held at Harris County Jail on a $20,000 bond.
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