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Netregistry swoops on Distribute.IT

The Netregistry Group has stepped in to acquire Distribute.IT after a recent hacking attack on the latter that saw thousands of customer emails and websites lost forever.
Written by Luke Hopewell, Contributor

The Netregistry Group has stepped in to acquire Distribute.IT after a recent hacking attack on the latter that saw thousands of customer emails and websites lost forever.

Distribute.IT fell victim to a hacking attack last week so violent that customer data, emails and websites hosted on four of its servers were deemed by experts to be unrecoverable. Distribute.IT told customers this week that 4800 domains and accounts had been affected by the hack.

Netregistry said in a statement today that it will look to provide assistance to Distribute.IT customers to get back on their feet during the acquisition process.

"We all have a great deal of sympathy and concern for the consequences to Distribute.IT staff, management and customers of this unfortunate incident. It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of effort to which Distribute.IT have gone to rectify the damage," said Netregistry CEO Larry Bloch.

Distribute.IT customers are now being given the option of moving their services to Netregistry's cloud infrastructure, housed in the Sydney-based Global Switch datacentre.

"We will honour all payments for hosting at Distribute.IT, but whilst we are assessing billing and payment history, we are giving all Distribute.IT customers a free hosting service as soon as humanly possible so they can upload their site and get their email addresses working," Bloch said.

The head of the .au Domain Administration (auDA) Chris Disspain has welcomed the takeover.

"I am very pleased that Netregistry Group, Distribute.IT and auDA have been able to cooperate effectively to arrive at an arrangement that is consistent with auDA's goal of ensuring the ongoing stability and security of .au," said Disspain.

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