Ethan Zuckerman writes on a oddity from a StopBadware.org press release: based on almost 50,000 website submitted to Stop Badware, almost 20% were hosted by iPowerWeb. Both Zuckerman and StopBadware.org suggest that iPowerWeb might be suffering from security issues allowing hackers to inject malicious code into their customers' websites. StopBadware's co-director John Palfrey stated:
This list of web hosting companies, pulled from our database of sites that are infected with badware, shows some companies that host a large number of sites that may suffer from unaddressed security issues. These security flaws mean that webmasters who use these hosting services may be more at risk of their sites being hacked.
If iPowerWeb knows about any such issues, they do not seem interested in letting their customers know;
their official blog is too busy trying to convince you to use them over other discount web hosting companies:
PowerWeb is a wonderful hosting company with years of industry experience and hundreds of thousands of customers to prove it. We take great pride in what we do at iPowerWeb and try to make the lives and businesses of all our customers much easier.
Meanwhile, other websites have noticed iPowerWeb's security issues:
- April 2007: Security Issues with Ipowerweb - a forum thread started by a person whose iPowerWeb account repeatedly and inexplicably receives databases full of others' personal information.
- January 2007: Multiple Shared Servers Hacked at iPowerWeb.com - a blog entry written by someone who found that multiple accounts on multiple iPowerWeb servers seemed to be compromised.
- July 2006: Net Watchdog: Hacked Site Causes Headaches - PC World reporter Tom Spring received a list from McAfee SiteAdvisor with more than a hundred compromised websites, several of which were hosted by iPowerWeb.
- May 2006: PHPBB security issues - on another forum thread, a commenter suggested that security issues that iPowerWeb claimed were the result of popular discussion board software phpBB were actually the result of an internal worm infecting their servers.