Sunday night, I was CentOS and testing out different environments under VMware.  It was 9 and I was about to head out, buy some quick groceries and go to my Santa Monica apartment, have some good food then get a good night’s sleep.  I went to one of my proxy’s–A Big Fruit and realized it wasn’t responding.  Jaslikon pinged it and it was ping-able so the server did not die on us.  I called up Kiet and asked if he knew what was going on.  He went home and did a remote hard reboot and it was the same thing.  My server was unresponsive but I could ping it.  I could not use it via HTTP, FTP nor SSH.  Jason had suspected that my server has been compromised and I was leaning towards the same conclusion too.  Kiet informed me of my bandwidth charts going wild.  I was averaging under 1Mbps of bandwidth and out of nowhere, it spiked to 8.8 Mbps!  Even after my server was unresponsive, Kiet noticed usage in bandwidth.  My server was hacked and we had to pull the plug on it.

Fortunately, I had a trump card so I had to change the nameservers to point to Hosting
Room and created “Under Maintenance” pages for both A Big Fruit and Myspace Squad
and provided my trump card as a temporary alternative.  PHProxy takes the URLs
and encrypts them but the trick is to take that encryption and have it in JavaScript
so it does not consume any system resources.  As a temporary solution, when the
user enters a URL, it would encrypt it and append it to the back of another proxy. 
I have several proxies randomized in the event that one does not work.  These
proxies are hosted by others so my trump card uses virtually no bandwidth.

Had to do a lot of scrambling, quick decision making and work long hours.  This
is like stress management like a mo##### f##ck#r!!  I have to migrate the top
sites over to a shared host and Hosting Room does not support PHP 5.x so I went with
A Small Orange on that one.  After migrating that over, I have to retrive my
files and reformat and secure my server.  Running a long term proxy business
is hard work but this hard work will pay off one of these days. =]