Response from HostGator supposedly
*Hello All,
I'm the owner of hostgator and what Goonburger is posting is a blatant lie. In this thread he says he works for us as system administrator and got fired for whistle blowing in the last few days. Here is his post he made on SA back in March where he says he's an ex employee predating this supposed hacking claiming of another hack.
"a llama Mar 09, 2010
Haha. As an ex-employee myself, I thought I'd toss in some additional information on an anonymous account beyond confirming a majority of the claims first-hand.
First: The minimum tax rate for unemployment insurance in Texas for 2008 was .10% not .26%
This also doesn't state rather or not any buy-downs were done nor does it state that you didn't bond against the account due to the large number of claims. This is effectively impossible to prove either way and the fact that you got bad information from your incompetent female HR representative proves a point that was made earlier by another poster.
TWC Tax Dept - Tax Rates
Second: Can you please deny entirely that every customer's credit card number was secured in your billing system by a four digit code that was also the code to the keypad on the buildings door? You know, the code that the entire staff was required to have in order to walk in the building and start work every day?
Could you also please deny the fact that a remote employees access in the same billing system and that four digit code was compromised and used to hack accounts / data-mine customer information for over 3 months until your security team finally realized that accounts kept getting hacked using FTP authentication without any indication of brute force or root compromisation?
Third: Do you normally release information on the number of sexual harassment complaints received and the situations of the people whom file them to internet forums? Doesn't that seem like private information, especially when identifying information such as 'left for a design based job' is included?
Fourth: As far as root backdoors, could you please deny the fact that with a very specific use of loops and variables it was possible to get full root bash access on your bounce box for upwards of 3 years due to how the 's' script (the script specifically used for connecting to other servers in the fleet) was programmed?
Fifth: Could you please deny the fact that management doesn't send out random emails to employees in attempts to entrap them? Please confirm that there was never an e-mail sent company wide detailing prostitutes, or posting in certain threads on somethingawful.com
Sixth: Could you please deny the fact that you personally have deleted negative reviews on your companies forum by moving them entirely to a different, dead forum and thus giving the appearance of only happy customers?
Feel free to post 'no comment' or cry libel. a llama fucked around with this message at Mar 16, 2010 around 18:11"
Just a few quick facts to point out...
Hostgator's billing system is on a single server, there is no blade. Our doors are secured by an access card system. It is impossible to type a code to get into our building since there is no system in place to take codes. Anyone in the houston area is able to quickly swing by our office to verify this for yourself.
We leave negative threads up in our forum and only remove them when we get permission from the customer. You can easily this for yourself by visiting our forum. There's been a couple incidents over the years were a thread was removed here or there without permission and I quickly wrote up the employees who made this mistake.
Hostgator has never been sued nor have we ever had any serious issues with sexual harassment. There was a single time when a chat tech employee filed a complaint against another chat tech employee. It turned out she was sexually harassing him first and got upset after he turned her down. This was a single complaint to HR that was dealt with but far from a serious issue considering she was the one doing the harassing.
I believe Goonburger is either an ex-employee from years ago or is a friend of a current employee and has never been employed by us. We will be going after him legally for Libel due to the seriousness of the claims he makes based off of hearsay and rumors. I believe this claim he is making somehow originated from some type of rumor from us switching all of our office computers from windows to ubuntu. Things have been pretty chaotic for us during this upgrade.
You don't have to take my word for it, but please read his claims he made both at SA and here to see how contradicting they are.
-Brent*
