Ka-Boom! Don’t get Shellshocked!
I Actually Didn't Want to Take That Left Turn at Albuquerque
Consider, if you will, cars. Almost everybody has a car. Almost everybody drives or rides in a car every day. Now imagine that somebody has discovered a way use a remote control to drive a car, virtually any car, anywhere they liked without the driver having any say in this turn of events. Now imagine that this vulnerability has existed for about twenty years and has just now been made public. Replace the word ‘car’ with ‘web server’ in the preceeding sentences, and you’ve pretty accurately described a major computer security vulnerability uncovered two weeks ago known as ‘Shellshock.’
Briefly put, Shellshock is a vulnerability in the underlying code that runs most web servers which could allow a hacker almost unfettered remote access to the core functionality of those servers. It is hard to overstate how widespread this problem is; the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology rated Shellshock a 10 out of a possible 10 in terms of severity since the software that Shellshock exploits can be found in so many places, including not only web servers but security systems and traffic lights as well.
EVERYBODY PANIC! EVERYBOD- Oh, You Fixed It
If that all sounds terrifying to you, you’re not alone. Technology firms around the country are scrambling to find patches for all their products as soon as possible. Apple and Red Hat have issued fixes and more are soon to follow. But where does that leave you and your business’s website?
If you host your site with Torx, you can rest easy. As soon as we learned about this problem along with most of the rest of the world on September 25th, we had a fix in place for all our clients within a few days. No prompting needed, no ticket request; when you host your website with Torx, you can be assured that we continually monitor our servers to make sure they are secure against the latest threats, whatever those might be, so you can concentrate on running your business.
Would you like to make sure your website is secure against Shellshock and other exploits? Host it with us! Give us a call at 804-577-8679 or drop us a line to find out more about our web hosting services.