I feel like continuing to talk about wht despite my ban because I work in this industry, and depend on it for my livelihood. My income depends on webhosting, I am completely financially independent & rely on absolutely no one other than this company for money to live. WHT has made itself a cornerstone of the industry, and it’s destruction would have a large affect on the industry’s stability.

A lot of things are being said. Let’s go over a few of the points being made:

1) “Rackspace should be blamed for not securing WHT completely!”
This is bullshit. Rackspace cannot be held accountable for the security of webhostingtalk.com’s website, or any of inet’s other properties. At the most, they should be responsible for the security of the software the server was provisioned with, and nothing more. I personally believe that WHT was compromised as a result of weak security within the applications that were written my inet’s developers.

2) “Why did prohacker write that database with credit card verification data stored within it!?”
I don’t believe mat was the person who wrote the database. I believe it was written by an ex-employee of iNet, Jeremy Johnstone. Jeremy has since gone on to work for yahoo. But, as an observer of the credit card dump, jeremy’s records are near the top of the database, which leads me to believe mat had no responsibility in the creation. However, he should have removed the database as soon as he discovered it, or at the very least, the moment WHT was compromised the first time.

3) “This is the second time in recent history that wht has been hacked!”
Actually, it’s the third. I believe the same people were responsible, too.

4) Separation of resources
I’m beginning to think WHT is operating their database servers at rackspace, and their webserver at softlayer. If this is the case, it’s going to cripple performance for the forum, because the routing between rackspace and softlayer is sub-par, and as a result, the whole web/db transaction is going to be much slower in comparison to a transaction where the db & web server are on the same network. Additionally, it’s going to eat a lot of bandwidth.

5) “WHY DENNIS WHY!?”
Dennis, like any 57 year old, really isn’t a server admin, or a programmer. He’s only the public voice of wht’s administration. He’s taking the things people say to him too personally, and the public are taking his answers as his literal answer, and dennis should simply be forwarding the public’s inquiries to the applicable developer(s) within inet. I’ll admit, I was guilty here, because I gave him a hard time on MSN about the verification codes being in the database, but he should be more clear about his role of messenger.

That’s all for now. Have a good one. Also, my ownership & direction of manchildren.org to WHT should not be interpreted as a security threat. If you believe this, you are a living idiot, and have no business operating any type of hosting business.