Data center hosting and cloud computing provider Rackspace confirmed that a server in one of its data centers was hit in the massive cyberattack that targeted Google and at least 20 other companies. The cyberattack aimed to steal proprietary code and intellectual property.
"Yesterday, a story broke around the world about a recent cyberattack that appears to have originated in China, involving Google and many other companies," Rackspace wrote on its blog. "Rackspace was a very small part of this situation and did everything possible to assist in resolving it. No customer data at Rackspace was compromised or altered as a result of this action."
According to Rackspace, a server was compromised and disabled and the company actively assisted in the investigation of the attack, cooperating with Google and other affected companies.
"Rackspace hosts tens of thousands of Web sites for customers and we take every precaution to make them safe and secure," Rackspace said in a statement. "As a hosting and cloud computing company, we run the servers and operating systems for our customer's Web sites, but customers run their own applications on those servers.
"Cyberattacks are a common occurrence in today's online world, and we work every day to combat them and make our servers safe for our customers," said the Rackspace statement.
Rackspace's statement comes after Google publicly confirmed that it was the victim of the same malicious attack, which is believed to have stemmed from China, and resulted in the loss of intellectual property. According to Google, the targeted attack went after the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
The attack, plus Google wanting to stop the censoring of search results in China, has prompted the search giant to consider halting operations in that country.
Along with Google, software maker Adobe this week also revealed it was part of the same attack. In a blog post, Adobe wrote that the company became aware of an incident on Jan. 2 "involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies."
In Adobe's case, the company said no sensitive information such as customer or financial data was compromised.
The attack has prompted some security researchers to theorize that a hole or vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat software was exploited to launch the attacks.
