In today's digital landscape, many businesses rely on specialized providers to handle essential services, such as email and electronic payments. But what happens when these companies become unreliable?
Who is OVH?
OVH is a major French company operating in the internet communications sector, offering services such as website hosting, virtual private and dedicated servers, cloud computing, and email. Despite its well-established reputation—indeed, it is a leading company in the dedicated server, VPS, cloud, and website hosting sectors—offering top-notch service at affordable prices (it also integrates an excellent DDOS attack prevention system), it appears to have several issues with third-party services, such as email services that use Microsoft Exchange as a platform and the Outlook client.
The recent security issue
Recently, a serious security incident at the European level affected many Italian companies, possibly linked to a wave of cyber attacks originating from Russia. In this context, it cannot be ruled out that OVH's infrastructure was also affected, specifically with regard to its third-party services, such as Microsoft Exchange's corporate email.
Numerous users have reported that their business accounts on OVH have been blocked and classified as spam senders.
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Spam Report Analysis
Many users used OVH's Exchange email service through Gmail, drastically reducing the possibility of unauthorized access. Furthermore, forensic analysis of the reported messages revealed that the spam emails were sent using spoofing techniques, exploiting existing vulnerabilities rather than compromising user accounts through insecure passwords. This type of attack could be prevented at the source: it would be sufficient to check whether the sender does not match the associated company domain. For example, if the company domain associated with the company mailbox is mysite.it and the email is sent from pincopallino.com, it is clearly an anomalous message.
OVH Support: Was this the failed management of the problem?
The real problem, however, appears to have been OVH's support: the company shifted the blame onto paying users, forcing them to prove their innocence. OVH's customer support, already known for its slow response times, was completely ineffective in this case, proposing inadequate solutions and simply managing the issue by suspending the affected accounts. Needless to say, this decision was disastrous, as companies were effectively unable to send emails, resulting in inconvenience and financial loss.
Loss of trust and migration to other services
Following this event, many companies have lost confidence in OVH for corporate email management and have migrated to more reliable services like Google Workspace. This demonstrates how, at a time when Europe needs to assert itself in the technology sector, under attack from Trump's United States, companies like OVH are failing to maintain the high quality and trust in their services, forcing users to choose overseas providers that offer, at least on paper, superior reliability.
An alarming precedent: the fire in data centers
This incident, incidentally, is not an isolated one. In 2021, a fire at an OVH data center caused the loss of data for thousands of Italian companies and websites, including their backups. OVH had not implemented adequate backup systems, forcing many companies to start from scratch.
Comments (1)
It is interesting that OVH, despite its good reputation in the industry, has had such serious problems with security. It is important that companies pay attention to these events to avoid future damage and loss of customers.