DataSurge: When Performance Matters

London South Bank University

London South Bank University designated DataSurge to investigate the instability of their main website. They wanted to know what was behind the erratic performance of the website and why the website was periodically unavailable.

Delving into the website, we discovered that the security of the site had been compromised by unauthorised activity -- the site had been hacked, with the hackers having covered their tracks.

We immediately began a process of "hardening" the website, removing unnecessary permissions, restricting access to the file system, registry and webserver, as well as initiating a thorough auditing process.

Further work included improving resilience by reconfiguring the hardware and documenation of resource-intensive code routines together with remedial action.