The authors of the Joomla software announced today that every version of Joomla between 3.2.0 and 3.4.4 has a critical security bug that allows hackers to take over a site (the bug is known as “CVE-2015-7857”).
The best solution for Joomla users is to update to version 3.4.5 immediately. However, we’ve also added a rule to our servers to protect our customers until they do this. The rule should ensure that if you use our hosting service, “hackers” won’t be able to take advantage of this bug.
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Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday August 7 2015, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.43 to 5.5.44. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 9:58 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Recently, PayPal has been sending notifications to merchants who use the “PayPal API”, discussing some changes they’re making. If you are one of our customers and you have received this e-mail from PayPal, you may be wondering if you need to do anything. The short answer is that you don’t; the change is being made entirely on the PayPal servers, and our service is fully compatible.
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One issue we (unfortunately) have lots of experience with is fixing a WordPress site after we discover it’s been “hacked”. But while it’s one thing to try to clean a Web site after it got infected on our servers, it’s essentially impossible to try to clean a Web site that was infected on another server and is being transferred to our servers.
We have a page with more information, including:
- why this is a problem, and the related risks of not fixing it
- why the normal way of fixing a site isn’t sufficient
- how to fix the problem
If you use an SSL certificate on a site you host with us, we now offer more control over the SSL/TLS protocol versions your site uses.
Old protocol versions, including SSL version 3 (“SSLv3”) and TLS version 1.0, are no longer considered secure. You can now disable these to improve security, at the expense of preventing some older, less-secure browsers from making SSL or TLS connections. Some credit card companies are starting to require that SSLv3 and TLS 1.0 both be disabled.
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Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday May 1 2015, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.41 to 5.5.43. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 9:43 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
The authors of WordPress today released version 4.2.1 that fixes a critical security bug.
While upgrading is always a good idea, we’ve blocked the attack for all versions of WordPress on all sites that we host. We’ve also verified using our MySQL binary logs that no sites were attacked before we started the blocking.
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Researchers recently found a critical security bug in the widely used Magento e-commerce shopping cart software. If you use this software and don’t update it to fix the bug, “hackers” can easily take over your site, including potentially stealing the credit card numbers of your customers.
We’ve analyzed the Magento software our customers have installed and found that more than half is unpatched, despite the Magento team sending e-mail notices to Magento users in February.
“Hackers” are now beginning to exploit the bug. Because this is so dangerous, we yesterday added security rules to block these attacks even if you haven’t updated.
Although we’re confident that these rules block the current attacks (we’ve seen it block several live attacks, and it makes sites we host pass the useful Shoplift bug tester), you should still patch your site if you use Magento: using outdated versions of e-commerce software is always dangerous.
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A couple of customers have asked if our servers are vulnerable to the FREAK attack SSL security bug.
The answer is no: we don’t use the weak “export grade ciphers suites” that are affected by the bug, so no site hosted on our servers is vulnerable. You can verify this with the FREAK attack server check tool.
For a long time, our mail system has blocked obviously malicious filenames like “443645787823424455.scr”, “Invoice.pdf.exe”, and so on, even if they aren’t actually flagged by the antivirus software we use (which can happen if they’re new viruses that don’t yet have matching patterns).
Recently, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in simpler names where the virus author doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s a program: things as simple as “Invoice.exe” in a zip file. We’ve received a couple of reports that people unzipped these, ran them, and clicked past the Windows warning saying that programs from the Internet can harm your computer — perhaps assuming that if it wasn’t flagged by either our virus scanner or the virus scanner on their own computer, it must be okay.
We want to make sure our customers never fall victim to anything like this, so we’ve expanded our blocked filename patterns to include simple “.exe” files (and other additions). This may very occasionally reject legitimate messages with an error asking the sender to rename the file and resend it, but it will solve far more problems than it causes.
We’re using the same list of filename extensions that Gmail uses — if we block it, Gmail would block it, too. You can find more information on our support page about virus scanning.
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