The vulnerabilities discovered allow remote attackers being able to perform various Cross-Side Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, create open redirects, poison cache, and bypass authorization access and input sanitation.

These vulnerabilities have been addressed and resolved in the latest WordPress version 5.3.1+.

Our team would like to kindly encourage our clients to update their WordPress installations to the latest, secure version to protect your website any of the mentioned attacks.

Additionally please consider reading our WordPress security guide for further recommendations to secure your WordPress website.

If you don’t update your WordPress version, and unfortunately your website is compromised by one of the above attacks, you may find this article helpful… “How did my WordPress website get hacked? What do I do?”

The festival attracts close to 800,000 visitors each season, with hundreds of thousands of tickets being sold and managed via the MICF website. Serversaurus has been collaborating with MICF by providing infrastructure, devops, support and 24×7 management for the festival website since 2016. We’re proud to boast a zero downtime partnership since then, with traffic growing year-on-year. Overall traffic is up 65% since 2016, with views up by nearly quarter since 2018, reaching 4.8 million in 2019.

The website and underlying infrastructure is one of the festivals most important communications channels, interacting with audiences, artists and key stakeholders. The website is critical throughout the entire festival, supporting patrons in navigating and planning the enormous festival program.

Serversaurus achieves high levels of redundancy from a hardware perspective, by running the infrastructure in a parallel configuration across a range of independent servers, including dedicated database and caching infrastructure. The entire puzzle is connected and kept in configuration through distributed service discovery, HAProxy, Ansible and in-house Go applications.

We can’t wait for 2020!

Migration.

This nine letter word can and does cause a world of hurt for even the most technologically savvy.

Taking the migration leap into the cloud or across from another provider, can have many benefits that include improved efficiencies, tighter security measures, lower operational costs and increased uptime to name a few. This would certainly explain why 76% of companies were planning a major data migration project within the next two years, according to a survey by ITWeb.

Despite more and more businesses choosing to make the migration leap, the process itself isn’t without its own unique set of complexities and challenges. According to research conducted by Bloor Research, migration projects that include services, consulting as well as data and software migration, currently costs industry in excess of $5bn per annum. Bloor Research studies also indicate that more than 60% of these data migration projects have delayed, exceeded budgetary requirements or even worse, been cancelled.

With billions of dollars being spent every year on data migration for more than more than half of migration projects experiencing issues, it does make one wonder WHY this is happening? One of the major reasons migration projects fail is because there is a unique skill-set, planning, level of experience and knowledge required to correctly employ the techniques and fundamental disciplines of migration projects. If not undertaken and completed correctly, this can have a catastrophic sequence of events for business.

Kroll Ontrack completed a global study in 2016 that outlined 32% of organisations have lost data while migrating between devices or upgrading systems. This study also uncovered that while 57% of respondents had a backup solution, 75% were unable to restore all of their lost data, with more than 23% (one-in-five) unable to recover any data at all. As if that isn’t bad enough, throw potential data sovereignty (jurisdiction) laws into the mix, inability to be able to reach your cloud provider for assistance… and … well let’s not even go there.

How do Australian based businesses avoid these problems?

First and foremost, having a cloud provider that is experienced, knowledgeable and deeply experienced with complex website and web application migrations is a must.

Secondly, working with an Australian based cloud provider (along with an Australian based engineering team) is paramount to being able to avoid two out of three of the problems listed above (data sovereignty/jurisdiction laws into the mix and the inability to be able to reach your hosting provider for assistance). In the event that something does occur, being able to make direct contact with your host will ensure that it is dealt with swiftly and without the ongoing stress of having to make continuous phone calls, even at odd hours of the night when you should be sleeping.

Last but not least, you want to partner with a cloud provider that will provide you with a customer experience that is second to none. There is nothing worse than experiencing an issue and then having to be subjected to a poor customer experience. Look for a cloud provider that offers a friendly and warming customer service team who will treat you like a person and not just a number.

Mel.

Melbourne, Victoria, 2nd August, 2016 – Serversaurus, a Melbourne-based green cloud computing company, has purchased the customers and infrastructure of Brisbane based cloud hosting company Tract.com.

Serversaurus co-founder Martin Gleeson said he was proud to be making the company’s first acquisition since its inception in 2005:

The purchase of the Tract.com customer base and assets is our first foray into acquired expansion outside of our organic growth over the last 11 years. This expansion brings with it both an existing customer base, as well as necessary infrastructure to upgrade and expand our services in Melbourne

Like Serversaurus, Tract.com is built on the OnApp cloud stack, offering a range of SSD powered hosting services, premium DNS and shared hosting. This acquisition will provide the base for Serversaurus’ next generation cloud platform, allowing for a seamless upgrade path from the original platform which went online in 2010.

Serversaurus co-founder Nick Jaffe looks forward to the infrastructure and reliability benefits of the acquisition:

In the last 6 years Serversaurus has maintained unprecedented uptime, outperforming the likes of Amazon Web Services and other major cloud players. This acquisition from an infrastructure perspective, will provide Serversaurus with the base platform necessary to upgrade and continue our high level of reliability, while causing the minimum amount of customer disruption.

Serversaurus will continue to provide the quality of service Tract.com customers have been used to, and looks forward to being able to offer additional products and services, such as proven high-traffic and high-availability solutions.

Serversaurus is proud to be able to grow and continue it’s mission in providing both world-class cloud services from its Melbourne based headquarters, while also continuing its environmental and sustainable business practices.

– ENDS –

About Serversaurus

Serversaurus is headquartered at Electron Workshop, their purpose-built coworking space, which is shared with other like-minded businesses and entrepreneurs.

Serversaurus and Electron Workshop were co-founded under the parent company Arktisma, by Melbourne-based entrepreneurs Nick Jaffe and Martin Gleeson in 2005.

Serversaurus is a 100% Melbourne, Australian based green web hosting company, offering email, domains, web hosting, management, content delivery (CDN), Anycast DNS, and cloud hosting services.

Serversaurus is Australia’s first certified web hosting B Corporation, and one of the exclusive group of Founding Australian B Corporations in 2014. In 2007 Serversaurus was the first Australian hosting company to carbon-offset its emissions, and donates 1% of its annual turnover to environmental charities through the 1% For The Planet program.

For more information on Arktisma projects, visit: serversaurus.com.au and electronworkshop.com.au

About B Corporation

B Corps are certified by the nonprofit B Lab. To become a B Corp a company must complete a B Impact Assessment to demonstrate how they voluntarily meet higher standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

B Lab provides tools for companies to measure, compare and improve their social and environmental performance.

For more information on B Corp, visit www.bcorporation.net

Our SSD storage is locally connected across a high speed backplane, providing arguably one of the fastest methods of hosting storage, allowing ultra quick database reads/writes & high speed static file access.

Couple your site with our included CDN and provide exceptional end user experience across your website, through high speed servers and globally replicated content.

In response, law enforcement around the world is currently in search of new ways to combat the use of Drones in unauthorised areas.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, the Dutch have begun training Eagles to take down & retrieve rogue Drones.

So far, teaching the Eagles to attack the Drones has been successful, however in the process its talons shred the device to pieces (surprise, surprise). This has proved the project to be more costly & difficult than expected.

Trials of this method will continue for the next few months before a decision is made whether to engage the eagles full-time.

Inspiration & reference @ABCNews

Although the first deployment will span 2 years before returning to the Tsushima coast, It is estimated that after 10 years of operation this device will have cleaned half of the waste which lies in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Not only is this the first ever passive ocean cleaning device but also the largest ever floating device to date.

Complementing this project the organization is also working with Tsushima Island to investigate whether the collected waste could be used as an alternative energy source.

Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup: “Taking care of the world’s ocean garbage problem is one of the largest environmental challenges mankind faces today. Not only will this first cleanup array contribute to cleaner waters and coasts but it simultaneously is an essential step towards our goal of cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time.

To read more about this project check out their website “The Ocean Cleanup”.

Certificate management and installation is extremely simple – please follow the official documentation to get your site encrypted instantly!

Unfortunately, the CDP agent can occasionally crash, and won’t come back on its own without external supervision (upstart, systemd, runit, etc).

WHM does come with its own process supervisor, chkservd, but its invocations are a bit magical.

The key to getting chksrvd to supervise is to drop a service definition in /etc/chkservd.d/cdp-agent:

service[cdp-agent]=x,x,x,/etc/init.d/cdp-agent restart,cdp,root

and to enable it in /etc/chkservd.conf:

cdp-agent:1

Once done, just restart the chkservd with /scripts/restartsrv_chkservd.

Automate Deployment

Doing this manually can be a bit painful once you have more than a handful of WHM/cPanel servers, so we’ve put together an Ansible role that can do it for you – https://galaxy.ansible.com/list#/roles/4106.

Ansible is definitely a handy tool if you want to be able to perform ad-hoc management actions, or make selective configuration changes to otherwise monolithic systems like WHM/cPanel. The ability to gently grow the configuration management approach on a larger fleet of existing systems is definitely somewhere that Ansible outshines the previous generation of tools, such as Chef and Puppet.

Digital Ocean Droplet

Period: 6 months
Total downtime: 3 hours 30 minutes over 16 outages
Uptime: 99.92%

Serversaurus Personal Hosting

Period: 6 months
Total downtime: 25 minutes over 3 outages
Uptime: 99.99%

You’ll also see within the average response time, Serversaurus is on average ~2.5x faster, with a smoother and more reliable response graph, which is surprising, since the monitoring agents are offshore and closer to the Digital Ocean droplet than our Serversaurus infrastructure in Melbourne.