Destructive Attack Wipes Cloud Data at Russian Hosting Provider Beget

Beget, one of Russia's largest domain registrars and hosting companies, is working to restore services after an overnight cyberattack on Sunday destroyed data across its cloud infrastructure and disrupted hundreds of websites. The company said on Wednesday that some servers were back online, but warned that full recovery would take a considerable amount of time because more than 1,000 servers must be manually inspected.

According to Beget, the attackers gained access to systems used to manage its infrastructure, which let them run scripts designed to erase data. The damage was worst in the cloud environment, where data tied to virtual private servers, cloud storage and Kubernetes services was wiped. The company also lost all binary backups of its virtual servers, although file-level backups survived and may help recover some information. Beget said it is still looking for ways to recover the lost data.

By Wednesday, some websites were running again, while engineers removed malicious files and checked data integrity. Dedicated servers managed directly by customers had already been restored. Beget said nearly all websites on its shared hosting can likely be recovered, though each server must be checked individually first. The source notes the attack comes amid a growing number of cyberattacks and drone strikes on Russian digital infrastructure companies.