hello, I have a site hosted at theplanet.com and someone appears to have stolen scripts/db of my site and created a resembling site on a free hosting site. I've found out that this person who did this was from Ft Worth, Texas and if I'm correct theplanet is also hosted in TX so I'm thinking how is this possible? I don't think my site was hacked but straight out copied out of my site's server.. is theplanet employees allowed to create a backup and host it on a free site for any reason? I'm just shocked that something like this happened.
make sure u keep all the logs first and u should contact the planet support once and ask for further clarification they can't simply take your files.
Chandan, what's more strange is that theplanet alpha service that I use, didn't notice any security breach .. and when I tracked down the date of stolen files, guess what? it was on 11/11/09, yes on Veteran's day! I'm currently really distressed how my site contents including full functions could be on a free hosting server?
Are you certain that it is your code that was stolen? Could it be possible that someone saw your site and made a clone?
it's not a clone 'cuz the whole database was copied straight out as well as functions. theplanet support tried to help me but they can only keep guessing since nothing shows in the record and told me to contact law enforcement agency. I'm just worried this can happen again without you knowing it. if it was done by some hacker who broke into my server somehow how could he have gone unnoticed? is it possible? any experts in web security field here?
1. Re legal issue: If your positive someone has stolen material that you have created or have rights to, you can likely file a DCMA take down notice. You may want the help of a legal professional to do this. 2. Technical: Please provide more detail about what was taken. You need to establish if what was taken could have been harvested from publicly accessible pages or if your account / server was indeed compromised. Can you be more specific about what was taken, such as the types of scripts and what kind of database information was taken? Where these pages fully accessible to the public? Was the database accessible to the public? Can you post the address of your site and the site that copied you? j
I forget his name but there is a helpful fellow around here who has a default dmca notice is his sig link. I am sure he will pop in sooner or later. If your app is proprietary or paid its another animal really. This of course always depends where they are located. I have been fortunate enough to resolve this sort of thing with a fairly nasty email to the culprit. Nigel
They could have scraped your pages and put the content into their own database. This is far more likely than someone doing a physical copy at a datacenter.
Consider filing a DMCA takedown notice with the site's hosting provider. There's a formatter for DMCA notices in my signature line. Also, if there are any ads being run on the infringing site, consider complaining to the advertising network which provides them. Google AdSense is usually very responsive to complaints over copyrighted material as they pay for legal content, not stolen content.
I think someone interested in your site/topic and make the cloning in other host for his advantage... This is not ethic but you must face it as risk of online sites/articles... The good side is .... Just hope that your articles submitted to directory with your link inside, that will be free backlink for you....
thanks law-dude and the rest of other folks for great info, yeah, it turned out to be some guy copying and pasting my site, what a jerk!