One of FireHost’s recently acquired customers, LawLeaf, a web-based financial services company that finds loans for people trying to finance the cost of lawsuits they’re filing, left its previous web hosting vendor, BlueHost, after an attack that almost put LawLeaf out of business.
LawLeaf Managing Director Tim Burke says he started the company in 2007 “with nickels” as a sideline to his main job selling member-management software to non-profit companies. He originally chose BlueHost to house LawLeaf.com because of awards the hosting company had won and because of its flat $6.95/month service plan. Burke says that he had been “pretty happy” with BlueHost’s service until LawLeaf.com started to go down at the beginning of the year.
In January, LawLeaf.com was hit with a SQL injection attack that compromised the PHP code that generates many of its pages. The infection caused the site to crash frequently and, worse, force-downloaded malware on unsuspecting users. By February, the site was crashing twice a week. By March it crashed ever day, Burke says.
