iPower client site down with malware downloader

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By Charlie - July 14th, 2008

One of our clients directed me to his website to download a document. When I went to the site, the following message appeared on the screen:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, support@ipower-inc.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Before I called the client back, I googled the website and opened a cached page. Whoah...a malware downloader came up (antivirus2009-scanner.com)! I called the client to let him know. Admittedly, I am no website guru and have no idea how the problem with his website occurred and if it is a problem that iPower will have to fix. However, I thought I would do a little research so I tried www.ipower-inc.com and the site did not come up. I googled ipower and found this blog! Wow, I really feel sorry for our client and the apparent "wall of stupidity" that he is going to smack into if he needs to contact them.

Ouch! Thanks for all the info. I know who to stay away from for hosting needs!!!

Comments

The exact same thing has

Submitted by Michael (not verified) on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 07:27.

The exact same thing has happened to a site I visit. I haven't been able to get hold of the site owners, so I've been emailing iPower myself trying to get them to do something about the issue. I've given them detailed information about my experience and linked to examples I've found of other iPower customers suffering from the same kind of hack, yet all I get back are irrelevant responses that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Tried calling them, too, but after being on hold more than an hour I gave up.

One more day and I'm going to call the FBI.

Apparently iPower has been compromised for ages (www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/052407_Security_Blog_Points_to_IPOWER_Hack.c...), yet they have not fixed the problem. If I hadn't dealt with them myself as I have this week, I would probably have assumed incompetence, but at this point I'm beginning to suspect collusion. It wouldn't surprise me if someone or some group of people at iPower are profiting from this somehow.

If nothing else, former and current iPower customers need to get together and sue the pants off this company, and hopefully put them out of business. This is gross negligence, perhaps even criminal negligence. Web site owners and their visitors can and should blame iPower when their PCs get infected with malware from a compromised site.

iPower -- the hacker-friendly hosting company!

We used to have several

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 08/08/2008 - 11:17.

We used to have several forums with them. It got bad around April 2006, that is when everything went downhill, but gradually. By early 2007, the forums were down almost daily too-many hits. I waited one time online for almost 2 hours, finally got a guy. He was very rude and said because I called them 3 times on the same issue I had exceeded the customer service quota and he said there was nothing more he could do. So I waited then finally on my old dialup account got the ftp in and backed up what I already didn't have backed up on their server, repointed my domain names to a new host, saved those sql databases for the forums and said Hasta La Vista to them. The day I called to cancel the service, I got that same guy who was rude. I had the final satisfaction after he got me my domain passwords to tell him I won't be with them anymore and that his treatment to me was the final cause of it. He seemed shocked. Maybe their employee tech people were on crack or something, but went with another host service, no issues since then. My best advice to others, backup your databases, get your domain name passwords and then say good bye and cut your loses. A day's worth of work setting up with a new host will spare you from bad people like Ipower became.