DomainFactory, one of the largest web hosting companies in Germany (where our website is currently hosted), has suffered a huge data breach. The breach dates back to January 29, 2018, and the attacker had access to sensitive customer data including name, company name, customer number, address, email address, telephone number, DomainFactory phone password, date of birth, bank name and account number (eg IBAN and BIC), and Schufa score (German credit score).

The first indication that a breach happened was a post by the attacker on the DomainFactory support forum on July 3. The forum has since been temporarily shut down but, according several websites, the attacker published data of a number of customers as proof. The attacker also said he hacked the hosting provider to obtain the data of a person who apparently owes him a large amount of money. But after he realized that DomainFactory was not disclosing the breach to its customers, he took the task upon himself. DomainFactory finally confirmed the breach on Friday and said they have started an investigation, called in external experts to help with it, notified the relevant data protection authority and are working on securing their systems to prevent similar breach in the future. The company said that the attacker accessed the data after "a data feed after a system change inadvertently made certain customer information accessible to outside parties."

In this context, it was also revealed that DomainFactory outsourced the 24/7 operational server supervision in January 2018 to "LvivIT!", a Ukrainian IT service of freelancers owned by GoDaddy Inc. A piquant detail is the fact that GoDaddy took over hosting company Host Europe Group in April 2017, which in turn acquired DomainFactory in October 2013. The information about the outsourcing of the technical administration was only known to certain resellers and not widely communicated to all customers so far.

Due to the non-transparent information policy regarding this controversial case, the resulting loss of trust and the lack of an honest and comprehensive statement on the part of DomainFactory, we see no other choice than moving our stuff to another hosting partner. For this reason 'Ellen Page Online' might experience a downtime of several days due to the relocation in the near future. Thank you for your understanding as well as taking the time reading this!