Real estate portal attacked by hackers

RealEstateGates.com officially announces of the hacker attack that took place last Friday, December 3. Portal's Security Systems detected the intrusion of at least 6 fraudsters throughout the day using different IP-addresses but presumably having the mutual purpose.

Fortunately, the confidential information on the portal stood the intrusion and remained inaccessible. However, the mailing system used was broken in.

Real Estate Gates uses the mailer to regularly send information to its members who are subscribed to the service. Users are usually subscribing for receiving daily news and articles, as well as the information on the portal's new offers and services. The fraudsters managed to bind their own databases and totally screw mailer's regular functioning. Thus, about 30,000 people having no idea of what was actually going on received the fraudulent letters that were considered to be spam.

But the main problem occurred when they tried to unsubscribe and apply for being removed from the spam-database. Hackers' rude virus attached to letters would resend all the replies around their database again and again. Some of the people received about 200 letters with "Unsubscribe Me" or "Remove Me" content. Many others would receive letters with some obscene phrases produced by those who badly wanted to stop receiving those letters they never asked for before.

RealEstateGates.com started receiving hundreds of letters of dissatisfaction and even containing threats to claim the corresponding authorities to prevent from spamming again.

The team of programmers supporting Real Estate Gates launched a campaign on preventing the real threat that the portal faced. In the course of the campaign the IP-addresses had been detected and the necessary measures taken. Within the framework of the campaign, the mailer that had been used before was modified and will from now detect any intrusions and quit functioning at once, so that people received no fraudulent letters.

RealEstateGates.com regrets about what happened and presents thousands of apologies to the people who received the letters and considered the portal to be a spammer. We hope that will never happen again. And even if it does, we will do everything to keep our users, as well as those throughout the internet on the safe side.


George Barrows
Security Service Manager
Real Estate Gates ( http://www.realestategates.com )