Several people have asked us about the recent WordPress WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache plugin security vulnerability.
For the most part, sites hosted on our servers aren’t vulnerable to this because we block comments that contain the malicious code.
We’ve talked before about WordPress login rate limiting. Attempts to guess WordPress administrator passwords are an ongoing problem, getting worse all the time.
The average WordPress site we host has received tens of thousands of malicious login attempts this month, with hundreds of thousands of different IP addresses being used in the attacks. We try to block the IP addresses that are responsible, but the ever increasing number of addresses means we can’t block all of them — an individual address often attempts a login only once a day for a given site. We need to adopt other tactics.
The PHP developers have announced the release of version 5.3.22 that fixes several bugs. We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.21 to version 5.3.22 on our servers as a result.
In addition, we now offer PHP version 5.4.12 as an optional choice in our control panel. For now, the PHP 5.4 series is recommended only for customers who need to test “cutting edge” features. Most customers should stick with the PHP 5.3 series, which is compatible with a wider variety of scripts.
There was a brief but severe performance problem on the web12 server today between 9:59 and 10:07 AM Pacific time. During this time, many Web server requests were very slow to load or even “timed out” completely. All services are now operating normally again. Other servers were not affected.
Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time February 26, 2013, each of our servers will be restarted for a “kernel upgrade”. This will cause an approximately four minute interruption of service for each customer at some point during this hour.
Earlier today, Twitter user @adam_baldwin mentioned finding a security flaw on our site. He reported this to us (thanks!) and we fixed it, then another Twitter user @mattmcgee asked what it was. It helps everyone on the Internet be transparent about security, so here’s an attempt at an explanation.
At 9:45 PM Pacific time February 6 2013, our “web03” server experienced a “kernel panic” and needed to be restarted. This led to an 11 minute outage of Web sites and e-mail hosted on that server.
All services are now working normally, and other servers were not affected. We apologize for the trouble this caused customers on the web03 server.
Beginning at 3:00 PM Pacific time February 5, a server on our network was the target of an extremely high volume DNS amplification denial of service attack. The inbound network data exceeded 11.6 Gbps, which is an extremely large amount — large enough to exceed the 10 Gpbs capacity of our upstream Ethernet switches and cause our entire network to slow down dramatically.
This affected all servers for about 19 minutes, until we and our network partners began discarding (“null routing”) all traffic targeted at that server. This fixed the problem for the rest of our network, but still left sites on the “web11” server unavailable.
To solve that, the IP addresses of all sites on the web11 server have been changed to new IP addresses that are working correctly and are not under attack. This was completed by 3:44 PM, and all sites on all servers are now working properly.
If the attackers target another IP address, we’re ready to immediately block that one, too. If that does happen, the way we’ve redistributed the IP addresses, in combination with previous analysis we’ve done on this attack, will allow us to immediately know which site is under attack. (It’s otherwise hard to determine which IP address is involved, because the type of attack we’re seeing targets only an IP address and not a specific Web site name.) That site will then be moved off our main network to prevent a recurrence.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers; we know you count on us for reliable service, and we’re committed to doing everything possible to avoid problems.
WordPress 3.5.1 was recently released, and as always, we’ve updated our WordPress one-click installer to automatically install the latest version for new WordPress sites.
If you’ve previously installed WordPress, you can upgrade it from within your WordPress Dashboard.
As a reminder, you should always update immediately when WordPress tells you there’s a new version available in the Dashboard. Don’t let yourself get behind, because it gets more difficult to update smoothly if you’re several versions out-of-date.
In addition, don’t avoid upgrading just because the upgrade screen says you should make a backup of your WordPress files and database first: we already make backups for you, automatically, every day.
The PHP developers have announced the release of version 5.3.21 that fixes several bugs.
We’ve upgraded PHP 5.3.20 to PHP 5.3.21 on our servers as a result.
