Network Solutions hosting continues to limp along while public relations campaign extols virtues of service with bargain pricing

smallvolution - a place to hang and vent?

Unlike McAfee who recovered from their bug last week in a few days, Network Solutions (NetSol) hosting service mis-handled its customer service for weeks with the “grep” iFrame redirect virus.

McAfee fixed the problem quickly and offered to compensate clients for their out-of-pocket costs. McAfee’s shares took a dive from $40 to $34.75 on news the bug will depress earnings a few cents. Analysts said McAfee was being punished for not meeting their numbers over several quarters.

Network Solutions has gone through stages of denial, admitting their helplessness and then public relations happy talk. Customer confidence has been shaken to the core. The response from Network Solutions appears to be management of social media. Website and social media chat sites are no substitute for excellent customer service.

We asked if Network Solutions intends to compensate their customers losses. They were non-committal. 

The attacks started April 10th, 2010 with more than 5% of NetSol’s customers infected with the trojan. The virus infected hosted sites on Network Solutions. When anyone visited a hosted site the virus attempted to infect their computer. Network Solutions hosting compromised thousands of accounts During the early attack Network Solutions was blaming customers with faulty password protection. Network Solutions also blamed WordPress for bad coding.

After a week of blaming users or WordPress software, Network Solutions came to grips with its inability to track and stop the virus on it’s servers.  On April 14th, Social media guru Shashi Bellamkonda at NetSol admitted it was their fault. WordPress is not the issue.

“Recently, our customers have complained about malicious code on certain of their blogs hosted by Network Solutions. This was not an issue with WordPress.  Sorry to the WordPress community and customers for any misunderstanding. This issue resulted from a complex combination of factors and we own it. We have taken steps to address this issue and we continue to work to protect our customers.”

That was cold comfort for the next wave of malware attacks that started within days. The same sites hosted by Network Solutions were re-infected. The number of sites rose above 2,000.

On Sunday April 18th, wrote Bellamkonda We feel your pain and are working hard to fix this.

“We have received reports that Network Solutions customers are seeing malicious code added to their websites and we are really sorry for this experience. At this time since anything we say in public may help the perpetrators, we are unable to provide details.”

The truth have been that Network Solutions still didn’t have a handle on the problem or how to stop the attacks. Three days later on Wednesday, a new wider attack by the Trojan took down many of the sites that went down before plus new ones. It took Network Solutions until late Monday or early Tuesday of the next week to bring some of those sites back on line.

After the third attack, we left Network Solutions for a host site that had better technical support and defenses against malware attacks.

Problems persist

Status Update: Back on Track in Helping Our Customers Succeed Online — Attack on Customer Web Sites Contained wrote Bellamkonda. “The security measures we have implemented have been effective in thwarting the attack on customer websites on the UNIX hosting servers.”

New problems cropped up at Network Solutions. Hosted sites could not add images to their sites, FTP and SSH were down and email accounts were being hacked.

Network Solutions is no stranger to controversy.