Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20

We have some facilities maintenance scheduled for this Friday. As part of this maintenance, we will need to physically move a handful of critical file and database servers between racks in our Phoenix datacenter. Since that equipment forms the heart of our hosting service, we’ll need to shut almost everything down briefly, just long enough to move it.

The maintenance window will be from 10am to 4pm MST (5pm to 11pm UTC) on Friday, November 20th, 2009.
Continue reading Scheduled Downtime for Friday, November 20…

A PHP Include Exploit Explained

We are having a fairly consistent problem with spammers auto-exploiting a very common type of scripting vulnerability that appears on our members’ sites. Unlike most vulnerabilities that stem from a faulty version of some app a lot of people use, this one crops up primarily on sites containing PHP code that people write themselves.

Cleaning up the resulting messes is getting a little tedious and so, even though this is hardly a new exploit, I wanted to write a little bit about what the vulnerability is, how it works, how spammers exploit it, and how to keep your site safe.
Continue reading A PHP Include Exploit Explained…