Category Archives: Joomla

Happy Halloween & Web Hosting Nightmares

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…

dirtycow

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 →

Critical Joomla Security Update

On Monday, December 14th, Joomla 3.4.6 was released to address a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2015-8562) that exists in all prior versions from 1.5.0 through 3.4.5. Hotfixes are also available for the older, unsupported 1.5 and 2.5 branches. It is imperative that you update all Joomla instances immediately. This was a zero day vulnerability that was actively being exploited prior to it having been discovered and patched. As such, it is remotely possible that your Joomla was already compromised.

We posted this to our forums and in our portal on Monday to give our clients a heads up but given the critical nature of this we figured another post couldn’t hurt. At that time we also deployed mod_security rules which we believe to sufficiently protect all Joomla instances hosted by us unless you have specifically disabled mod_security on the domain, which is not the default or recommended. As always, though, it is still important that these latest patches be applied immediately in order to secure your Joomla instances.

If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact us and we hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!