Dear community,
After several days with little sleep guiding our team to try to recover what was lost, this morning I finally contacted a specialized data recovery company to get a quote for recovering the data on the nodes. I was told that the process would be lengthy and costy. That it could take 15 days to complete this process, involving the use of custom tools, and recovering each individual file manually, and costing around 1000€ per each virtual machine.
Needless to say, that this is totally outside of our budget as Eterhost has not even made any profit yet. So the idea of recovering the deleted vms, had to be discarded.
Therefore, today we decided to start up the nodes again so we could evaluate the damage done by the attack. Our desolation was inmense when we realized that only 8 VPS had survived the attack contrary to what we estimated in the beginning.
The hostname of the saved vps is the following:
cursed3
Server2
amphoria
mytheria3
metin2poison
mt2pl
syne
lytonia2
I'm being absolutely honest to you when I say that today is one of the worst moments, if not the worst, in my life, and these words, the hardest to write. I have tears on my eyes. There's just no way to describe the inmense damage caused by the attack, and no excuses to our unability to prevent it. Dozens of projects with many hours of work behind them have been wiped out forever, including some of our own projects such as *********.
The creation of Eterhost was inspired by the need of effectively protect players and server owners from DDoS attacks without spending a lot on it. Making money was never the primary inspiration for our projects, yet in moments like this, I really wish I was rich so we could at least give an adequate compensation to our customers for what happened. But we are not. We are just normal guys like you who are trying to make a living out of our work. My first thinking was that as we were not able to give our customers the needed safety within our budget, we should just close Eterhost and declare the company bankrupt, firing our four employees. But that would not compensate your loss in any way.
So there's nothing left for me but ask you, how I can at least try to repair the damage that was done to you.
We purchased a storage server with enough capacity for all the nodes and designed a fully secure backup strategy for it. We are willing to give all the affected customers a 1 year vps for no charge at all, even if it means that we will makes loses for several months. If you have a better idea, by all means please let me know. If you just want to insult or hate me, by all means do it as well as we surely deserved it.
I would like to end now, with a personal note, which I feel is needed.
I don't normally talk about this because everyone have their own problems as well, but since 10 years ago, I have a chronical illness known as Chronic Fatigation Syndrome, and getting a small pension from the government which evaluated my condition as being 66% disabled.
Among other things, this causes the whole body to react negatively to stress situations. The situation I lived these days -which is not the first stressful situation I lived recently due to the amount of criminal energy directed from the SG team towards us- made my condition much worse, being unable to eat and sleep, and feeling an extreme weakness and unability to concentrate on tasks.
I will have to rest for several weeks and take medication before I can lead a "normal" life again, or as normal as your life can be when you can't make ane exercise or effort. Therefore, all the tasks will be delegated to my team now, although I will try to keep an eye on the situation now and then. Many, if not all of you are probably angry at me and want a personal explanation, but it would do my health no good to feel even more guilty and upset about what happened. I hope you can understand that I am not trying to hide from criticism or anything. My staff will get in touch with you once a decision is taken on what to do next.
Finally, thank you all for putting your trust in me, and my most sincere apologies from the deepest of my heart for having failed to this trust.
Yours,
Juan