Tag: Security

  • Distrubution release support (CentOS4/Debian 5)

    Linux distributions keep moving forwards, and as they progress older releases stop receiving security patches or updates. As part of our commitment to maintaining reliable and safe services, we would like to highlight the following announcements… CentOS-4 End Of Life The CentOS-4 distribution (current version 4.9) will be at End of Life on February 29,…

  • Plesk updates and server security

    Recently we were advised of a significant vulnerability in all older versions of the Plesk Panel. If you have not done so recently, we strongly recommend you schedule some time to update. Extended details about that are available. You can follow their instructions to update your Plesk instance.  Or please just pop in a support…

  • Linux kernel CVE-2012-0056 vulnerability

    You have probably all heard about the recent local privilige escalation in recent Linux kernels by now. If not you can read all about it here. This only affects our recent Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” VPSs, which by default were installed with a Linux 3.0.4 kernel. The 3.0.4 kernel was also tested to work with some…

  • Checking a potentially hacked machine and reinstalling packages when you break things

    Sometimes you may see something odd go past in the logs, on the screen, or something might just seem a bit ‘off’ somehow. Its a good idea when this happens to just double check that things are as they should be, verify packages, binaries, check logs etc Here are a few things i find helpful…

  • DigiNotar and SSL certificates

    Great news! We were pretty sure, but a recent notification from our certificate supplier told us that none of the certificates ordered on behalf of our customers are signed by DigiNotar. For those of you not aware, DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority who provided signed SSL Certificates against their own trust chain. Which was recognized…

  • Why is your server sending spam? why does it keep crashing with high load?

    We get asked these questions regularly, and 9 out of 10 times it may be because your server may have been hacked, either on a user level, web application, or more. Here are some ways to quickly check for the most common things we see , and some of the processes we go through to…

  • Apache exploit may crash your server – heres how to fix it

    We have picked up that there was an exploit in Apache which can result in your server running out of memory. the discovery was noticed quiet some time ago, but never fixed, and it seems to have reared its head publicly resulting in some people actively attacking. There is no patch for apache as yet,…

  • PCI compliance – a basic HOWTO

    A lot of people are wanting to be PCI compliant these days, and this is generally a good thing. PCI compliance is not just a server spec, but a list of procedures, policies, controls over access to data. Therefore the server side is only one part of the process. It can be expensive and time…

  • Confluence Wiki install script

    Quite often lately we have been asked to set up a Java based wiki, or customers have asked specifically for Confluence® (made by Atlassian® ) by name. Confluence is a powerful and sometimes complex piece of software, so to make the setup for that easier I created an install script. In a very short time…

  • Jboss Exploits

    There is a JBoss exploit out in the wild.  See http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0738 and https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-30741 for details.