Rescuing damaged Server installs

High load isn't necessarily an emergency, but it may be a heads-up before a site noticeably slows down. Sometimes there are weird spikes that just go away, but sometimes this is an indication of a Denial of Service.

At 12:27pm, our alerts started firing. Multiple ones -- website down, server down, secondary monitoring -- one of our client's servers had completely disappeared off the Internet.

No, you should not. You should let us worry about them, and go back to your business.

Seriously, we're getting questions from all kinds of people about whether this matters. I'm a bit surprised that there is any question about that. Would you be concerned if your top salesperson was selling for somebody else? If your cashiers were jotting down credit card numbers when they charged a card? If your office became a well-known spot for illicit drug or gun dealers? If your office had a bunch of scammers squatting and running a pyramid scheme? If your confidential client information could be revealed as easily as using a bic pen on an old Kryptonite lock?

We've seen some variation of every single one of those scenarios. And all of them are possible with a remote code execution flaw in a web application, like yesterday's Drupal security vulnerability.

And yet people still

The Meltdown vulnerability leaked out into public news a full week before patches were available for many distributions. When patches did become available, sometimes the patch caused further trouble.

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

The only thing the homeowner may notice is a slight slowdown in their Internet connection. But meanwhile, their cable modem or webcam was out bringing down the Internet. This was just one of the scenarios described by David Hobbs at the MIT Enterprise Forum.

This is why you want to be on our maintenance plans. Our number one priority is recoverability, from just about any risk. And today, we had a client that needed this, in a very bad way!