Behind the Scenes: Security Patches & Private Network Updates

It has been a little while since we posted an update on what we’re working on behind the scenes here at Dathorn, so I wanted to take a quick moment to share. While it is easy to notice new features or see us working on your helpdesk tickets, much of our work goes completely unnoticed. That is, after all, our goal. We try to perform all updates, maintenance, etc. without any impact to your service.

While software patches and security updates are an ongoing battle, there have been a few noteworthy items as of late. You may have already heard about “Stack Clash”, a local privilege escalation vulnerability present in most Linux and BSD systems. Fortunately, we were able to quickly protect our servers against this without any service interruption, thanks to KernelCare. Traditionally, such kernel updates would require a reboot of each server but that has long been a thing of the past for us.

A few security issues have also been addressed in OpenVPN, including a remote code execution vulnerability. While serious, all of our instances were patched immediately and the severity of this particular issue for us was much lower since we only use OpenVPN internally for accessing certain private resources, such as IPMI on our servers. This had a much greater impact on VPN providers.

While on the topic of VPNs, we have overhauled our private network for even better performance. This doesn’t really impact clients directly but it does allow for even quicker backups and restores. In doing so, we also replaced all VPN access points and have configured them with even further redundancy.

It’s hard to believe that we’re nearly half way through 2017 but there is still a lot to come this year. A number of new cPanel updates and features will be deployed across our fleet of servers within the coming months. Plus, we’re still planning to increase our hosting plan limits across the board, free of charge, by the end of the year. Stay tuned!

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