We’ve finally made it to the last day of October and we all know what that means, Happy Halloween! Given the timing I thought it would be appropriate to discuss something scary that was discovered earlier this month…

The so eloquently named “Dirty COW” (copy-on-write) vulnerability that came to light a couple of weeks ago is what nightmares are made of when you’re a web host. This vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195) had been lurking in the Linux kernel since 2007 until it was publicized and patched earlier this month. All of our servers were patched within hours of this discovery thanks to CloudLinux’s KernelCare which allows us to apply such hotfixes without rebooting. Continue reading →