OVH Data Breach (2013)

France-based web hosting company OVH has been hacked. As a result of the incident, customers are being advised to change their passwords. “A few days ago, we discovered that the security of our internal network at our offices in Roubaix had been compromised. After internal investigations, it appeared that a hacker was able to obtain access to an email account of one of our system administrators,” OVH representatives stated. “With this email access, they were able to gain access to the internal VPN of another employee. Then with this VPN access, they were able to compromise the access of one of the system administrators who handles the internal backoffice.” The company believes the cybercriminals were after two things: their European customer database, and their installation server system in Canada. The European customer database holds customer names, contact details, and encrypted passwords. Fortunately, the company doesn’t store any credit card information.