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Synced.org will delay approval of free hosting

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ephekt

Active Member
Hello everyone!
Many of you know me here as the owner of Synced.org and I wanted to jump on and make a post about the current activity of Synced.org instead of some other kids posting negative things regarding situations they do not understand.

We are on hold for accepting new accounts. This delay started about 3 days ago and will continue until Wednesday, OCT 4th. It could go a bit longer, we hope it does not.
It has come to our attention there were two users on one of our machines exploiting cpanel privileges and a few more users using a new form of spamming through our smtp mail system. We are one of the few free hosts who permit smtp relay and we will continue to, that is why we are delaying new accounts - so we can fix the problem. We were contacted by AOL as it appears a few users were forging AOL accounts and using our servers to send out phishing scams, sneaky kids these days!
We will be back soon, and for the records a blanket e-mail was dispatched to the hosted clients on one of our servers. This server was the most heavily impacted server in a negative way. We will update this post with the ip's of the users and as much information as we have on them as possible. Thank you for your understandings, see you all soon.
 
Saves the hassle of finding out that they were fakes, gmail may be next too because everyone can ask someone to send them an invite or send invites to themselves to create yet another email
 
i hate what happened to you, but i don't think denying people with free email to signe up is a good idea, after all this is a "Free" hosting company, now i'm not an expert, but since you wanna make sure that the email is not fake, can't you add like a verification email to be send out for every person who wants to join in.

Hope your problem be fixed soon, cause i'm thinking about signing up, with my hotmail account
 
darkox said:
i hate what happened to you, but i don't think denying people with free email to signe up is a good idea, after all this is a "Free" hosting company, now i'm not an expert, but since you wanna make sure that the email is not fake, can't you add like a verification email to be send out for every person who wants to join in.

Hope your problem be fixed soon, cause i'm thinking about signing up, with my hotmail account
Click to expand...

The problem with free e-mails is anyone can set up as many accounts as they wish. So if ya burn your bridges with one account you just set up another.

"Free" hosting does not impy that one should get there server blacklisted. Cause of some spammers and or phisers. "Free" Host need to be weary of whom they allow on their servers. And if the only e-mail address you have is a free one. then i suggest you contact your ISP and see about getting a e-mail addy with them.

"Free" host are not here to grant a requesters every whim and desire.

Granted thier are plenty host out there whom accept "free" email addys.
So really you should not have a problem finding a host.
 
Actually, people were forging AOL accounts to purchase, spam, and send emails out to the internet. We have a verification process upon sign up that stops fake or forged emails. The issue was spammers were using our smtp relays to actually forge other internet goer's accounts. The CPanel priviliages were not from the recent patch, but rather a flaw in our set up.
 
ephekt said:
It has come to our attention there were two users on one of our machines exploiting cpanel privileges and a few more users using a new form of spamming through our smtp mail system. We are one of the few free hosts who permit smtp relay and we will continue to, that is why we are delaying new accounts - so we can fix the problem. We were contacted by AOL as it appears a few users were forging AOL accounts and using our servers to send out phishing scams, sneaky kids these days!
Click to expand...
What you are talking about above is my specific field of expertise ...

I'd be glad to take a look at your server and give you some tips for
cleaning it up and improving security a couple thousand notches so
that you aren't vulnerable to something like that again.

Contact me directly by private message if you would like some help
 
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Hi,
It was nothing we could do - it had to do with cpanel and the recent exploit. The e-mail forging was a script running through a modified php nuke, so we did not notice it. We have serviced the problem and we are no longer going to offer automatic free hosting. Its unfortunate that people have to abuse free services that are offered to the public in hopes of helping. Oh well. Thanks amz for the concern though.
 
ephekt said:
Hi,
It was nothing we could do - it had to do with cpanel and the recent exploit. The e-mail forging was a script running through a modified php nuke, so we did not notice it. We have serviced the problem and we are no longer going to offer automatic free hosting. Its unfortunate that people have to abuse free services that are offered to the public in hopes of helping. Oh well. Thanks amz for the concern though.
Click to expand...
On the contrary, had your security been right in the first place you would
not have been vulnerable to any Cpanel exploits known or unknown!

And yes, it very much could have been prevented quite easily!

As such you really cannot blame Cpanel or anyone else for this!

Even with just a few quick minimal modifications without going to the
extreme with things, you could still have prevented this and increased
your security by about a million times just doing quick simple things
that any administrator could do and that is the real issue at hand
and one that I'd be willing to help you with.

And just for your information, we've been running automatic instant signups
for a great many years at our services and ironically, we have none of
the problems that normally plague other hosts but then we also know
what we are doing, have security up the wazoo, and our signup system
isn't your typical brainless signup 'everyone' blindly type of page either.

It's not often that I directly offer to help as I am extremely busy but your
thread here looks like you could use some expert help.
 
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