We’ve had a couple of people ask if our servers are vulnerable to the recent security bug in the bash shell, also known as the “shellshock” bug.
The answer is no. All copies of bash on all our servers were updated to a fixed (patched) version yesterday, within an hour of the news becoming public.
Update September 25, 2:58 PM: We’ve also applied a later, stronger version of the fix today. This will soon be announced as Debian Security Advisory DSA-3035-1 .
If your site uses an SSL certificate from us, our servers now provide an important feature called perfect forward secrecy.
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Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday August 9 2014, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.38. This will cause an approximately 30 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 and all services are running normally.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yesterday, Internet security researchers announced discovery of the Heartbleed SSL security bug. This bug allows attackers to bypass SSL encryption on servers that use certain versions of software called “OpenSSL”.
Our servers are not, and never have been, vulnerable to this bug, because we’ve never used the affected versions of the OpenSSL software. Our customers are not affected by it in any way.
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