Managed Hosting with Security — Hardened Servers, Active Threat Defense

Every managed server is deployed with our security hardening baseline — a comprehensive checklist derived from CIS Benchmarks and real-world operational experience. The baseline includes disabling root password authentication, configuring SSH key-only access on a non-standard port, removing unnecessary packages and services, setting restrictive filesystem permissions, and configuring kernel security parameters.

Specific hardening measures include:

• SSH: key-only auth, non-standard port, MaxAuthTries 3, AllowUsers whitelist
• Firewall: default-deny policy, only required ports open, rate limiting on SSH
• Kernel: ASLR enabled, exec-shield, restricted dmesg and kernel pointer access
• Filesystem: noexec on /tmp, nosuid on user-writable directories, immutable flag on critical configs
• Services: only required services running, unnecessary daemons disabled and removed

Host-based intrusion detection (HIDS) monitors your server for signs of compromise. We deploy OSSEC or Wazuh agents that monitor file integrity, detect rootkits, analyze log files for suspicious patterns, and alert on unauthorized configuration changes. Any modification to system binaries, configuration files, or SSH authorized_keys triggers an immediate investigation.

Network-based detection monitors incoming traffic for exploitation attempts, brute-force attacks, and known attack signatures. Fail2ban blocks IP addresses after repeated authentication failures. Our WAF rules (ModSecurity or equivalent) filter malicious HTTP requests before they reach your application. IP reputation databases and threat intelligence feeds provide early warning about known malicious sources.

Automated malware scanning runs daily using ClamAV and custom signature databases tuned for server-side threats. Scans cover web-accessible directories, uploaded files, email attachments, and temporary directories. When malware is detected, our team isolates the infected files, determines the infection vector, removes the malware, and hardens the entry point to prevent reinfection.

For web applications, we perform periodic checks for common web shells, crypto miners, spam scripts, and SEO spam injections. These are threats that ClamAV often misses because they appear as legitimate PHP, Python, or Perl scripts. Our custom detection rules identify these threats by behavior patterns — encoded payloads, suspicious function calls, unexpected network connections — rather than relying solely on signature matching.

When a security incident occurs, our response follows a defined playbook: contain the threat, assess the impact, eradicate the cause, recover normal operations, and document the findings. Containment might mean isolating a compromised service, blocking an attacker's IP range, or disabling a vulnerable account. Assessment determines what was accessed, modified, or exfiltrated.

Post-incident, we provide a detailed security report covering the timeline, attack vector, affected systems, data impact assessment, and remediation actions taken. We also implement preventive measures — additional monitoring rules, hardened configurations, and patched vulnerabilities — to prevent similar incidents. For compliance-sensitive environments, our incident reports meet the documentation requirements of GDPR, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001 breach notification procedures.