That's pretty crazy, though with the hack publicly disclosed, it was bound to be exploited. What I don't understand is why this report incident comes so late. The hack has been public for a large amount of time. Could anyone explain?
OVH isn't responsible for what people do with the servers. They provide the initial installation, networking, hardware monitoring and some management tools, but that's it. If they detect that a server is sending too much traffic, they can guess that it has been hacked, so what they usually do is disable it and notify the owner to fix it. But they don't do more, that's not their business. If you want a host that does more for you, it's managed hosting you want, not a dedicated server provider.
But if you receive DDOS attack to your server from outside, they can defend you using network resources.
This is an internal attack, which requires different mitigation measures, and is seen less often in the wild (compromising 500 servers from a specific provider is more difficult than 500 random servers on the internet, and you're pretty much guaranteed that the provider will deactivate most of them after the first attack), so I guess their protection systems aren't as developped against it.
If it's actually your server that actually attack another server, they will shutdown your server and give you a warning. They will let you boot in their recovery os that let you access your file system but if your server does it again, they terminate your account.
No, it's not. They have a proper anti-ddos solution in place for attacks from outside of their network[1].
[1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/anti-ddos/ddos-attack-management.xml
I don't think DO offers any managed service. They wouldn't do anything to fix your servers. It's entirely on you to keep them updated.
Edit: https://www.digitalocean.com/help/policy/ <- they really don't offer it
I know that many of us that run systems for which availability criteria mean they want full manual control over all updates, but those are the people that either use custom images or know how to turn those automatic updates off.
Security updates are finally pushed hard on desktop users for obvious reasons, with everyone and their mother running cheap VPS's these days the same logic should apply to virtual servers.
Ubuntu, for example, can be configured to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade automatically every day (using unattended-upgrades), but AFAIK the default configuration only checks for updates, notifies the admin, and waits for approval before actually changing anything.
Even though Ubuntu LTS, Debian Stable, CentOS, etc. are supposed to be stable distributions, it is not unheard of for routine updates to break something mission-critical. For example, the package maintainer might have made some changes to the default configuration. (C'mon, do you really need to make minor changes to nginx.conf all the time?) A daemon might go down and fail to come up again after an update. (apt is particularly annoying in this regard, since it forcibly restarts daemons during an upgrade, and not always in a sensible order. Result: HTTP 502 Bad Gateway.) So unless a human is present to spot any issues immediately after an update, you might be left with a broken system at an inconvenient hour. Which is why the documentation doesn't recommend fully automated updates.
Unfortunately, the set of VPS owners who don't apply updates regularly probably has a large intersection with the set of VPS owners who won't be able to troubleshoot a broken update anyway, so maybe this concern need not apply...
(CoreOS employee)
At best this is monitoring and playing whack-a-mole on their part which they've done a pretty good job of by the looks.
Also, although I have many things to blame OVH for, they at least take a somewhat proactive stance regarding security, even for the very cheap dedicated servers. They usually contact you when they notice a traffic spike on unusual ports for example.
But yeah... judging by the people I know in real life who own cheap OVH dedicated servers, I'm not surprised at all by these news.
I'm pretty sure 90% of the customers are not professionally trained in server maintenance. I am, and I don't want to do it anyways unless I have a good reason to do it.
The company I currently work for have to full racks in two data centres each, most of which is near idle and it's a full time job for 2 people. Could do away with all the machines and all the associated administrative staff, just use a devops team and shave 40% of capex and opex as well by moving to something else.
But then again, they might not be getting nice lunches with HP and the DC vendor.
The hard part was to set-up all these services, keeping them up-to-date, since no other party depends on them it is considerably easy and almost risk-free. Other than that is not time-consuming at all. Only 2 times in 3 years I had to re-configure a service. Most of the times I just run an upgrade-script on a tmux session and everything runs smoothly (I rarely use pre-compiled packages).
Now, if I had a production-level web application, I would probably set-up as carefully as I could a new VPS and roll my application there, up to the point where I needed to scale.
If it would be a one-man-show I'd probably go with Heroku (since I write sinatra/ruby/rails applications) or similar (possible cheaper) service to avoid spending time on sys-admin. But these service IMHO are still, expensive for projects with no income while a VPS can do all that and mode at once at a considerably lower price.
ps. As a side note. Before I join HN, I though that all programmers were capable of sys-admin (UNIX servers). Then I realized that tasks that seem trivial to me, are considered somewhat difficult for others and vice-versa of course.
If you're asking about the hosting company, they largely don't care what you do unless someone complains.