Russian hosting provider Beget lost websites, cloud storage, VPS (virtual private server) hosting and Kubernetes container hosting in a cyberattack on November 1, and it says more than 1,000 servers must be inspected by hand before services return.
The company recorded abnormal activity immediately before the outage, and every level of its infrastructure was affected. Assessing the damage took several days. Beget told a Russian newspaper that most data for the majority of its virtual hosting and cloud customers should be recoverable from backups, but that the volume makes the process slow. Its public statement read: "We are not giving up and are continuing to look for ways to recover this data." It also told customers to change passwords and replace access keys and other credentials stored on its cloud servers.
Beget has not disclosed the cause of the attack or how the attackers got in, and no one has been named. The incident came amid a run of drone and online attacks on Russian tech companies, and Ukraine-based or anti-Putin actors inside Russia are presumed responsible. That is presumption, not attribution.
Beget is not a minor player. Founded in 2007, it is the second-largest registrar for .ru domains, with 14.7% of the market. The EU has also sanctioned it for providing hosting to authorities in the Russian-occupied regions of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. Whether that made it a target is unknown.
Anatoly Sazonov of Softline Group called the outage an example of systemic risk from relying on a single provider. A site, corporate mail and databases hosted in one place can stall several parts of a business at once. Recovery is also complicated by how Beget organizes and prioritizes data, and by many customers having no disaster recovery plan of their own.
Beget has not said whether the manual checks reflect lasting damage or caution, and that answer will largely decide how long customers wait.