Steve Frank’s article on Don’t Use FTP has been posted on various social news sites, and I think it is an excellent piece how this 20+ year old protocol should have retired from being the stock standard of transferring files at many web hosting companies. It is not secure (not guaranteed even when FTPS is used), it is a PITA for those setting up firewalls, and it is definitely not the best protocol for developers to automate file transfer. Why many shared hosting companies provide only FTP for file upload is beyond me.

SecurityFocus: Linux kernel memory access vulnerabilities, exploit included to get you root account on stock kernels between 2.6.17 and 2.6.24.1. Web hosts responded — Holy !$#&!!! CentOS 5, Ubuntu Edgy-Gutsy, Debian Etch — all these Linux distributions are affected. Basically a local user can gain root access, and with help from vulnerable applications that allow executing arbitrary local code, a remote user might be able to take over the entire system.

Netcraft: in reflecting to a previous report where HostGator sites were hacked to distribute IE exploits, HostGator responded saying that there is a bad security hole in cPanel that is currently wildly distributed.

Hackers gained access to HostGator’s servers late Thursday and began redirecting customer sites to outside web pages that exploit an unpatched VML security hole in Internet Explorer to infect web surfers with trojans. The existence of the new “0-day” exploit of cPanel leaves a large number of hosting companies vulnerable to similar attacks until they install the patch. The riusk is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it is a local exploit, meaning any attack on a host must be launched from an existing account with cPanel access.

Last week (9-15 April). 8,750 failed SSH login attempt, averaging almost one per minute, trying out all kinds of possible user names and left tons of junk in my message log. The recent SSH brute-force attacks (actually it’s not that recent) are rather annoying, and this article at Whitedust.com has useful information on how to prevent this kind of attacks.