General Security/Performance Upgrades

Over the past 24 hours we have added some extra safety precautions to our server in order to secure the protection and integrity of all our clients and their websites. In addition, we have made a few tweaks to ensure the performance of our server is as high as possible. The measures taken are as follows.

- CHKRootKit – a simple program that detects and hacker software and notifies us if any has been detected via email.
- RootKit Hunter – scanning tool to ensure our system does not have any backdoors or exploits.
- Securing and Upgrading of SSH Server – increases security during ssh connections failures and automatically blocks the attackers ip in the firewall.
- System Integrity Monitor – 24×7 Internal Monitor that checks all services and restarts them if they are down.
- SPRI – changes the priority of different processes in accordance to level of importance, hence increasing server performance.
- Secure and Optimize Apache (HTTP)- tweaks apache to perform better, and prevent unnecessary information from being easily seen. Also installed mod_security to restrict web attacks.
- MySQL optimization – increases performance of MySQL.
- host.conf hardenening – prevent dns lookup poisoning & spoofing protection.
- nsswitch.conf modification – secure and optimize DNS lookups.
- sysctl.conf hardening – helps prevent TCP/IP stack from syn-flood attacks and other network abuses.
- Shell Fork Bomb/Memory Hog Protection – prevents a user logged into a shell from consuming all the resources on the server.
- TMP Directory hardening ( /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm) – helps prevents execution of malicious scripts.

As always, HostedFX is always striving to provide the best service possible for you.

cPanel 11 Stable Release Schedule

As some of you may or may not know, we here at HostedFX are eagerly awaiting the stable release of cPanel 11. The latest version of cPanel is going to bring a lot of great new features as well as better security and functionality.

All things being well, we should be looking at around early August for the stable upgrade to cPanel 11

MySQL Issue

Over the last 24 hours we have been testing the newest version of cPanel – cPanel 11. During this time we found a number of bugs, and security problems, not to mention the 505 errors displayed across the server. We have reported our findings to cPanel themselves, and await a response. Due to this we have delayed our upgrade until cPanel fixes all known bugs.

This time of testing has essentially only been carried out in order to improve your experience as a customer and we thank you for your patience during this time. You may view the new features that will be available when we do upgrade to a stable release of cPanel 11 here:
- http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWH…11/security.htm

We have now downgraded back to cPanel 10, and all should be working as normal. We had an unfortunate MySQL error which has now been resolved.

Once again, thank you for your patience,
Gareth

[Warning] TopSites

In the past week there have been issues on several servers which point back to TopSites installations. TopSites is a popular site ranking script which you may be familiar with.

The problem we see is that many different IPs (most are hijacked PCs located in Turkey, used as bot networks) are hammering these TopSites directories, acting as mini DoS attacks against those servers. The last security advisory for TopSites was last year, but apparently it remains unpatched. This does not give us much faith in the developers – it could have been fixed a long time ago, then we would not be dealing with this problem now.

The bottomline is that we are forced to disable the affected directories as we find them. We do recommend replacing this script with a similar one. We are likely disabling TopSites in all Fantastico panels.

Automation Features of New Client Area

With the new client area brings something I have wanted for a long time – automation! In this post I will briefly outline the automated processed carried out automatically by the client area. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment – HostedFX will always listen.

Account Creation/Suspension/Termination
- New accounts will be automatically created, and the details emailed to you, after the first payment is due.
- Accounts will be automatically suspended after a payment is 2 days overdue.
- Suspended accounts will be automatically unsuspended the second an overdue invoice is paid.
- Accounts will be automatically terminated 90 days after the last payment was received.

Billing
- Invoices will be generated 7 days before the payment is sent.
- A reminder will be sent 1 day before the payment is due, if it has not been paid.
- An invoice ‘overdue message’ will be sent if payment reaches 1 day late.

That’s basically it. If you don’t agree with anything, please let me know