One of our customers asked if multiple domain names hosted with us are vulnerable to “website cross-contamination”, a nasty security problem that can happen at many hosting companies when two different sites share the same “account”.
The answer is no. We intentionally handle multiple hosted domain names differently from the way most hosting companies handle extra hosted domain names, avoiding the problem.
Over the last few days, we’ve been tracking an ever-increasing distributed attack on the WordPress xmlrpc.php service.
We’ve previously seen and blocked attacks on this file that tried to post spam comments or act as a denial of service amplifier, but this attack is different: it tries to guess WordPress usernames and passwords.
As a result, we’ve applied more aggressive blocking than usual to the attack. It’s remotely possible that the blocking could cause legitimate third-party WordPress “apps” and services to be unable to access your blog (although it can’t cause problems when just visiting WordPress in a normal Web browser); don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re one of our customers having trouble.
Just so it’s clear, we’ve blocked this attack for all our hosting customers. But the rest of this post has some technical details that may help other people trying to do the same.
We often get reports from customers saying they’ve been blocked from their WordPress sites with a strange generic error message or blank page.
When we investigate, it’s common to find that it happened because they installed a security plugin that has made a mistake — a “false positive” — and blocked the site owner.
A customer recently reported problems when forwarding mail sent from a “@cs.com” CompuServe address to a Yahoo or Gmail address. Yahoo completely rejects the forwarded message and Gmail puts it in a “spam” folder.
This is caused by a misconfiguration at cs.com, and happens whenever anyone, anywhere, forwards @cs.com mail. It’s not related to our service in particular. However, we’ve reported this to cs.com in the hope that they’ll fix it.
Until they do so, there’s no way to avoid this problem except by having the sender send mail directly to the final destination address, or converting the forwarding address to a mailbox. (This problem is another example of the general rule that “a mailbox is usually more reliable than a forwarding address, because forwarding involves two places where things can go wrong instead of just one”.)
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 7, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.29 and 5.5.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve updated PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
We recently explained how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the “Gravity Forms” WordPress plugin.
We’ve added a support article explaining how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the similar “Contact Form 7” plugin, too.
If you use either of these plugins and you’re seeing mail rejected with errors about “DMARC”, the links above will help you fix it.
Customers who forward their mail to Gmail occasionally tell us that they can’t find a message they know someone sent them, even when they’ve searched Gmail for it.
These messages are often eventually found in the “Spam” or “Trash” folders of Gmail. What’s surprising is that by default, Gmail search doesn’t look in these folders at all, so people are (quite reasonably) sure it’s not there.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, May 24, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
We’ve updated the MySQL database software on our servers from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.37 for security reasons.
Customers should not notice any changes, as the update merely fixes bugs and doesn’t introduce new features. But as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
