[Outage] PHP interpreter vulnerability — Sunday update

Most customer web sites should now be online and accessible again. I still have a handful of sites left to bring online which I’ll work on tomorrow.

I’ve disabled PHP on a few sites which did not seem to have any PHP files in use on them, and those sites have been made available served directly from the Servology network. Those sites which were not being served through a front-end proxy are now using that proxy — this is needed to control access to the vulnerable servers.

Sites which do use PHP are instead being served through an external web application firewall (WAF) which proxies requests to the existing Servology servers. In these cases, I’ve had to change the nameservers of the domain containing the site so that the third party system can actively manage certain DNS records to provide their services. I do plan to take back these domains onto Servology nameservers as soon as I can migrate the sites in question to fixed servers; the external WAF and third-party nameservers are intended to be a temporary mitigation rather than a permanent setup. Unfortunately, nameserver changes can take up to 48 hours (2 days) to fully propagate, and it’s possible that from some ISPs, those web sites may take that long to become available again.

There are also various web tools, mostly inherited from previous providers, which Servology customers may well be using; however, I don’t have documentation on which of those tools are in use by which customers. These tools are mostly PHP-based and will need to be protected. I do expect to be able to provide these services again, but will probably have to issue extra passwords for them, so if you need access, please email my support address and I’ll get things set up for you. Examples of such services are control panels, webmail, and database managers, but if there’s anything else you used to have access to and which you still want to use, do let me know.