I am going to be doing kernel upgrades on all of our servers this afternoon. This will result in reboots for all of our servers. The reboots mean that your account may be offline for about 15 minutes while the servers come back up. The kernel upgrades don’t really fix any major security concerns, I just believe that it is best to stay on top of new kernel upgrades just in case there are undisclosed concerns.

Scott

The issue regarding Horde has been resolved and Horde is once again available to everyone. If you experience any problems, please submit a support request.

Steven

We have temporarily disabled Horde webmail across all of our servers as a security precaution. We have learnt through a security bulletin from cPanel that there is an exploit on the Internet that is affecting Horde. The cPanel developers are working on developing a patch for this issue. They have advised that all webhosts disable Horde to prevent the vulnerability from causing problems on the servers. This is the advice that we are following and this is why Horde has been disabled.

I don’t know when the patch will be rolled out, hopefully it will not take too long. However for the sake of security we decided to follow cPanel’s advice and disable Horde for the time being until this issue can be sorted out.

All of your e-mail and Horde settings will remain intact. Nothing has been lost. You can continue to use Squirrelmail for webmail. Once the issue with Horde is resolved we will re-enable Horde on the servers and you will again have access to Horde.

Steven

We are planning to have all of our servers rebooted this week (February 17 – February 23). The reboot is necessary to perform a security check on the servers as a result of the recent server exploits that have been affecting servers throughout the webhosting industry. We don’t anticipate any problems, but we want to perform these reboots just to be sure. The reboots should happen in the late evening hours or early morning hours. We don’t have an exact timetable for each server as it just depends on how quickly we can perform these security checks and reboots, we will likely span these reboots across multiple evenings. Downtime associated with each reboot should not exceed 15 minutes and would probably be closer to 5 minutes.

Steven

We are encouraging all of our users to take the time to modify the password for their account. Some changes have been made to the control panel interface for changing your password which helps to insure that your password is strong and secure. In the past we have had a lot of trouble with very weak passwords being used. If you use a weak password, then you are basically contributing to weak security systems which can allow a hacker to gain access to your account. If you don’t take care of your passwords and use very weak passwords then it just becomes that much easier for hackers to gain access to your account. Once hackers gain access to your account, they would then have full privileges to your account.

We have no reason to believe that any of our accounts have had their passwords compromised. There has been a lot of talk recently concerning account security, especially in light of the recent server-wide exploit that is still being investigated. However it is always a good idea to change the password on your account regularly just in case a hacker or malicious user has gotten access to your password. This is the point that we are stressing with this post.

We have written a guide that details how to change your account password. You should probably consider changing the passwords for everything associated with your account, POP passwords, MySQL passwords, etc. However your main account password is the main thing to pay attention to.

Steven