The PHP developers recently released versions 8.0.23 and 8.1.10 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1 series on our servers as a result.
Customers should not notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The authors of the popular BackupBuddy WordPress plugin recently announced a serious security bug in many versions of their software.
This bug is being exploited by “hackers” who have used it to download the private “wp-config.php” file of many WordPress sites. It’s then possible to use the private information in that file to login to your WordPress dashboard without knowing the password, or to modify your site’s database.
We’ve added firewall rules to block downloads of that file via the bug, but in addition, we’re taking the following steps to protect our customers who were using a vulnerable version of the BackupBuddy plugin at any point between August 26 and September 8:
These are the steps recommended in the post by the BackupBuddy authors, so our customers don’t need to do this themselves. (The post also suggests an optional third step, but that doesn’t apply to most WordPress sites.)
The only difference affected customers should notice is that WordPress may ask for your normal password again the next time you login, rather than “remembering” you from a previous login.
If you’re using the BackupBuddy plugin on your site, it’s also a good idea to make sure you’re using the latest version of it — in fact, it’s a good idea to turn on automatic updates for all your plugins to minimize the risk of something like this affecting you.
Finally, keep in mind that we already make daily backups of your website at no extra charge. We never want to discourage people from making their own additional backups, but those extra backups are most useful if they’re stored in another location (not just on the same server you’re making a backup of). While investigating this, we noticed that most people using BackupBuddy are simply storing an extra copy on the same server, which doesn’t add much protection against data loss. If you make your own backups, you should ideally copy them to your own computer, or to an external location like Dropbox.
The PHP developers recently released version 8.0.22 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
In addition, we’ve added support for PHP 8.1 (currently version 8.1.9). We consider PHP 8.1 to be only experimental for now; it still has incompatibilities with many scripts, including WordPress, and should probably not be used on production sites. If you try it and have any trouble, we recommend you simply switch back to an earlier version of PHP in our control panel.
As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.4.30 and 8.0.21 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.4.29 and 8.0.18 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released version 8.0.17 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
This change should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
Customers have asked us whether our servers are vulnerable to the recent serious security bug CVE-2022-0847 (nicknamed “Dirty Pipe”) in the Linux kernel software (explained in more technical detail here).
The good news is that we don’t use the vulnerable versions of the kernel software on our servers, and we’ve verified in multiple ways that our servers are not vulnerable to this problem.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.4.28 and 8.0.16 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.4.27 and 8.0.14 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.4 and 8.0 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.
If you use WordPress, and you allow strangers to register for WordPress accounts (which isn’t usually a good idea, but some plugins require it), it’s possible to accidentally configure it so that those new users get created as WordPress administrators. That can happen simply by doing this:
Allowing this is a serious flaw that was supposed to be fixed in WordPress itself some time ago, but the problem still exists.
We don’t think it’s reasonable to ever create new users as “Administrators” by default, regardless of whether you have “anyone can register” turned on. (Even if “anyone can register” is turned off now, it would be easy to turn it on later without remembering to change the default role back.)
To make sure our customers’ sites stay secure, we’ve added some protections against this:
Nobody should notice any changes as a result of this, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or difficulties.
