The Netregistry Group has bought stricken web hosting company, Distribute.IT after thousands of customer e-mails and websites were lost because of a malicious cyber attack.

The hacking attack on Distribute.IT last week was so severe that information on four of its servers was unrecoverable. Customers were told this week that 4800 websites and accounts were lost.

The Netregistry Group will provide assistance to Distribute IT customers to try to get back the information that was lost in the hacking attack. Netregistry has bought all aspects of Distribute IT's business except the legal entity. The acquisition also included the customer base, The Australian reports.

"We all have a great deal of sympathy and concern for the consequences to Distribute.IT staff, management and customers of this unfortunate incident. It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of effort to which Distribute.IT have gone to rectify the damage," said Netregistry CEO Larry Bloch.

The attack was launched last Saturday night on June 11 and it wiped out Distribute.IT's hard drive address blocks. The hackers also destroyed the company's back-ups making it impossible to recover any data.

Netregistry will now face the uphill battle of getting the affected websites back online. This will be more difficult if customers don't have independent backups of their websites files. Domain names hosted and registered through Distribute.IT will also have to be released and reassigned. Affected .au domain names are now in the process of being transferred out.

In a statement on Netregistry Group's website Mr.Bloch assured its customers that services will be returned as rapidly as possible.

"I am very pleased that Netregistry Group, Distribute.IT and auDA have been able to cooperate effectively to arrive at an arrangement that is consistent with auDA's goal of ensuring the ongoing stability and security of .au," he said.

Distribute.IT's customers could also opt to move to Netregistry Group where the hosting customers will be placed on the group's secure cloud infrastructure. Netregistry will honor the payments for hosting at Distribute.IT and will give the customers free hosting.