Preventing Attacks

Craig asks,

Just ran across a sad story where Digital Ocean is accused of killing a startup:

New versions of Drupal core dropped today, to fix a file handling issue.

After assessing the patches, statements, and risks associated with this update, we have decided this is an important update to apply, but not urgent for most of the sites we manage.

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.

Drupal security updates generally come out on Wednesdays, to try to streamline everybody's time. WordPress security notices come out... well, whenever whichever feed you subscribe to bothers to announce something.

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.

DevOps is the union of development, operations, and quality assurance -- but it's really the other way around.

As I write, we're in the midst of a big Ransomware attack. Millions of computers have been infected, with their data encrypted, held ransom pending an extortion payment or deleted. Supposedly.

Yesterday Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major outage in their US-East datacenter, in Virgina. It made all sorts of national news, largely because it affected some major online services.