A system administrator - or, more accurately, a former system administrator - from Hostgator, a server hosting company in Houston, Texas, has been arrested for hacking into his former employer's network.
Court documents allege that after Eric Gunnar Grisse, 29, got the sack from his job at Hostgator, he jumped right back into the company's network, using a backdoor Trojan he had planted earlier.
Hosting companies do just what their name suggests: they run racks full of servers, plus a network to connect them all up, and then rent you time and space on one or more of them, so you don't need to own and operate your own IT infrastructure.
The services available typically include: simple websites, where your web pages are handled by a web server that also hosts other user's websites; virtual servers, where virtualisation is used to share out powerful physical servers amongst multiple customers; and dedicated servers, where a specific physical server is provisioned with an operating system and turned over to you almost as if it were your own.
Read more:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/21/hostgator-hacked-suspect-rooted-with-own-rootkit/