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Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#41

Post by 13 »

patio11 wrote: post #39

Incidentally, since many HNers probably come at this from a mental model of "Anything which appears on an invoice is non-negotiable and simply must be paid": a B2B service provider which collects payment after services are rendered is knowingly taking on credit risk and has already priced non-collectability of some accounts into their services. You may be overestimating how much drama is required for someone at their…

I have had this experience. In my case the bill was altered to $0 before I'd even got to the point in the conversation where I intended to ask for some relief. It most certainly doesn't cost them that much, and it's within their interests to keep customers coming back for repeat payments than soured by being forced to pay an exorbitant fee for something which was obviously not their fault.

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#42

Post by notok22 »

njsubedi wrote: post #38
onestone wrote: post #30

Stop using providers which charge a ridiculous price for bandwidth (like AWS). There are many excellent alternatives where a TB costs only a few dollars/euros.

like?

Hetzner has the first 20 TB free and then charges 2 euros per TB.

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#44

Post by bluedino »

zhovner wrote: post #21

To prevent such incidents Linode have alerts of traffic/cpu/disk thresholds. For example you can configure notification if your bandwidth utilization more than N Mbit/s in duration more than N minutes. Very useful for DDoS prevention.

And look at your dashboards once in a while. I'd find it unusual if I saw my toy VPS cranking out 100mbs for a week straight!

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#45

Post by thewhk »

I work for a VPS provider in the US. These situations are common and we usually just issue a credit and give a reminder to the customer to please secure their server

That brings me to my point. How did the hack occur? When you get a VPS you are fully responsible for what goes on in there. It is your responsibility to secure it and keep it updated. It's not the provider's fault you did not apply the latest security updates. It's not the provider's fault your Java application was using outdated and vulnerable libraries nor is it their fault you didn't set a CAPTCHA in front of your submission forms. Either hire a competent sysadmin if you can't take care of that yourself or find a provider that offeres managed hosting instead of a VPS, as that's what you'd most likely need.

There are some cases where it's the provider's fault such as the Linode BitCoin hack a few years back but mostly it's just poor server maintenance

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#46

Post by donniezazen »

Blahah wrote: post #10

1. Report the incident to the police. Right now. 2. Report it to the VPS provider. Explain that you've reported it to the police. Ask for their cooperation in investigating the problem. You do not have to pay. If they try to force you to pay, depending on your country, you'll probably end up in small claims court where you'll find judges are very reasonable people who usually side with the little guy. (IANAL)

I hope cyber crime police has improved their working in recent years. 5-6 years ago a Ebay seller defrauded me. I filed a complaint with all the information I had since everything is online and involved bank transactions there had to be a money trail. I never heard back from cyber crime cell. I don't know how many folks were defrauded by that person before and after the incident with me.

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#47

Post by Blahah »

donniezazen wrote: post #46
Blahah wrote: post #10

1. Report the incident to the police. Right now. 2. Report it to the VPS provider. Explain that you've reported it to the police. Ask for their cooperation in investigating the problem. You do not have to pay. If they try to force you to pay, depending on your country, you'll probably end up in small claims court where you'll find judges are very reasonable people who usually side with the little guy. (IANAL)

I hope cyber crime police has improved their working in recent years. 5-6 years ago a Ebay seller defrauded me. I filed a complaint with all the information I had since everything is online and involved bank transactions there had to be a money trail. I never heard back from cyber crime cell. I don't know how many folks were defrauded by that person before and after the incident with me.

I doubt it has improved much - in general if I report a crime to the police I don't expect it to be solved.

The reason for reporting is that it is the first step in initiating most civil means of compensation (insurance, company cancelling the charge, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#48

Post by tdicola »

Anyone have tips on how to secure their Linux VPS? I just set one up and disabled SSH password login, locked down all the ports with iptables (using ufw), and enabled fail2ban. Anything else I should install or configure to make myself a little more secure? Was considering tripwire but I dunno how much a headache it would be with false positives as I change things on the server.

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#49

Post by readme »

patio11 wrote: post #39

Incidentally, since many HNers probably come at this from a mental model of "Anything which appears on an invoice is non-negotiable and simply must be paid": a B2B service provider which collects payment after services are rendered is knowingly taking on credit risk and has already priced non-collectability of some accounts into their services. You may be overestimating how much drama is required for someone at their…

Also OP, if they don't write it off make sure to tell us all who it was so we can avoid them.

The same thing happened to me with amazon. Amazon pid for it. It's highly unreasonable in my opinion to ask the customer of a VPS to pay for damages caused by a malicious attacker. It's tantamount to a landlord expecting you to pay after an arsonist comes along and burns down your apartment, just because you happened to be renting it at the time.

Re: Ask HN: My VPS got hacked and now I'm facing a massive bill. What can I do?

#50

Post by justizin »

13 wrote: post #41
patio11 wrote: post #39

Incidentally, since many HNers probably come at this from a mental model of "Anything which appears on an invoice is non-negotiable and simply must be paid": a B2B service provider which collects payment after services are rendered is knowingly taking on credit risk and has already priced non-collectability of some accounts into their services. You may be overestimating how much drama is required for someone at their…

I have had this experience. In my case the bill was altered to $0 before I'd even got to the point in the conversation where I intended to ask for some relief. It most certainly doesn't cost them that much, and it's within their interests to keep customers coming back for repeat payments than soured by being forced to pay an exorbitant fee for something which was obviously not their fault.

Yeah, the $4k is kind of a manufactured figure, bandwidth expenses are particularly inflated, but it makes sense at smaller scale - if you have a $15/mo plan with 2TB of transfer and you go over 1TB, a few bucks penalty doesn't sound outrageous, and their cost is impacted by higher network management costs.

But, if you have a huge spike that wasn't really your fault, it doesn't cost them any more to write that off than it does the bandwidth that is consumed by a DDoS attack that is mitigated by a firewall.

When I worked at Rackspace, we hosted a very popular flash cartoon for one month after yahoo kicked them off the $5 hosting plan for pushing god knows how much bandwidth. They basically saturated a gigabit network port from a single server, and we sent them a bill for like a gajillion dollars. They went to another hosting company, of course, and I think got the bill down to something they managed to pay off.

Someone obviously had porsche-eyes, I thought it was kind of a shitty thing to do to the guys, who came to the office to make the voices of their characters for us and stuff.

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