Web host absolves ex-employee of hacking blame

THE WEB HOST at the centre of yesterday's Bittorrent tracker website outages has confirmed that it was not conducted by an ex-employee.

As The INQUIRER reported, the downtime of Reality Check Network's (RCN) servers due to corruption of the master boot records (MBR) had resulted in the shuttering of numerous Bittorrent tracker websites. It led to RCN's CEO, Moisey Uretsky, pointing the finger of blame towards an ex-employee who had worked at the firm for three years and had "intimate knowledge" of the internal setup.

Since the report, The INQUIRER has been approached by the ex-employee, who wishes to withhold his name, with evidence that not only did he leave RCN under amicable circumstances with a reference from Uretsky that describes him as "courteous, timely and eager", but that he had nothing to do with the recent outage at RCN.

Not surprisingly, the network engineer who had initially joined RCN as part of a university placement scheme and worked on the firm's network management and storage setup was not happy that Uretsky publicly implied that he was responsible for the hack and wishes Uretsky to absolve him of any implied blame. 

Uretsky has confirmed to The INQUIRER that the downtime was not due to an ex-employee as he initially stated and that he has been "assured" by the ex-employee that he was not to blame. Uretsky says that he has filed a report with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and will be "relying on them to conduct an investigation".

The notion that the FBI might be investigating and leafing through log files is likely to send shivers down the spine of those Bittorrent tracker websites that carried torrent files which might be viewed as 'questionable' content by the authorities.

The INQUIRER has been forwarded another email in which RCN is advising its customers that another hosting firm, ISPrime, will be taking over those servers that had been hacked. In the email sent out to all customers, Uretsky explains this move was due to "the level of damage that was sustained to both customer servers and infrastructure machines" and that the backup and restoration procedure was "taking too long". 

Uretsky advises those customers affected to contact the new hosting firm to arrange contracts. He has since confirmed to The INQUIRER that RCN is working to recover data and setup on "alternative hosts".

At press time RCN's website is still showing a temporary notice page. µ