Account Hacked Into

How was it done and by who?

[derekwong28]

One of my webhosting account had been hacked so that my website redirects to another domain. Apparently the .htaccess file had been changed and the following addition found
RedirectMatch permanent ^/$
[newdomain...]

I have never given the Cpanel login to anyone. My other accounts on that server are unaffected.

The domain to which ny website was redirected to belonged to a bricks and mortar store in Canada. I contacted them about this and they denied knowing anything about this. From their tone, I do believe them on this.

I wonder if anything like this has happened to you before? Have you any idea how was this done, and also who would do this? e.g. could it be a rogue SEO firm or a paid traffic provider?

[jomaxx]

Do you use FTP or Telnet? Both are unencrypted protocols and are serious security risks.

On shared servers there are also various ways that users can hack into other accounts or even get root access.

[derekwong28]

I use FTP, this is a dedicated server that contains my accounts only.