Protected by Scarecrow

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Website Hacks and Hosting Provider Shenanigans

...and also database issues.

Our file monitoring service got started when a local business owner came to us after her site had been hacked. She’d found out about it when her customers told her it was suddenly serving porn.

Obviously that was bad. So we built a service that would go out and get lists of all files stored on a website, and notify via email whenever files changed. Then we added a notification threshold so a certain number of changes needed to happen before notifications were triggered, since (it turned out) some files change fairly often for some of our customers’ sites.

Problem solved, right? Well, not quite. 

Another customer told us his site was up, and all files were still in place–but due to a billing problem, his site’s hosting provider was, instead of the home page, showing all visitors a notice that the bill had not been paid.

Obviously that too was bad. So we built in automated checking for actual content at specified addresses, which conveniently ties in to our (also unique) distributed uptime checking system. Better!

This had the handy effect, also, of detecting when content stored in a database was not available or had changed (such as for WordPress sites, but it works everywhere). Also handy if all files are the same, but an attacker has gained access to the database and defaced a site that way.

Since we were trying very hard to build a “Swiss army knife” for small business websites, of course we built in both file and database backups. With “point in time” restores in just a few clicks, so if catastrophe does happen? It’s not hard to revert a site to an earlier state when all was well.

Putting it all together, Scarecrow offers a unique hack-detection, database status monitor, and quick-correction system that, as far as we know, is simply not available anywhere else.