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Killing SSL SHA-1 Certificates And Making The Web A Safer Place

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Recently PayPal has sent emails to many of its users informing them that SSL upgrades will be performed on their servers and SHA-1 certificates will be upgraded to SHA-256. Some people got confused what they should do when receiving these emails, as the mail that PayPal sent and the blog post they shared, giving more details to the users contain very technical information. Hence, we would like to explain to our customers how end users will be affected from the changes that PayPal makes and what they have to do. Continue reading “Killing SSL SHA-1 Certificates And Making The Web A Safer Place”

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PHP 7 + OpCache Now Available On All Shared SiteGround Servers

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PHP 8.4: Stay Updated! 🚀 Check out our latest blog post to explore the newest features and enhancements in PHP 8.4.

UPDATE: PHP 7.0 has Memcached support which you can use for object caching. If you’re using our SiteGround Optimizer plugin, it will automatically use the appropriate drop-in.
 

HHVM has significantly changed the way PHP sites are optimized for performance. Right now it is probably the fastest stable execution engine for PHP scripts. However, with PHP 7 on the horizon things may change and HHVM may face a serious competitor as according to some benchmarking tests and those disclosed by Zend, PHP 7 is much faster than HHVM.

Important: Even though it’s stable, PHP 7.0 is still in beta and it’s not recommended that you use it on live websites. In addition, it does not yet have Memcache support which means that if you want to use the SuperCacher and PHP7, you need to disable the Memcache option from the plugin backend before switching to PHP7.

Continue reading “PHP 7 + OpCache Now Available On All Shared SiteGround Servers”
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Techies @work, techies @fun… Techies @SiteGround unite

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When I joined SiteGround 7 years ago, we were about 50 people and I recall that in just two weeks I had met and talked to everyone in the company. Seven years later, we have 5 offices in 3 different cities in Bulgaria only, and more and more people are starting to work remotely for the company. Until last week, I had never seen some of my new colleagues from the technical support and system administration departments.
Continue reading “Techies @work, techies @fun… Techies @SiteGround unite”

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Building The Joomla.com Hosting Platform

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When SiteGround was chosen by OSM to be the official hosting provider for Joomla.com – the new free website service by Joomla, we were really excited. We knew that creating an infrastructure that needs to host hundreds of thousands of sites will not be an easy task. This was a huge and complicated project, but our passion for complex technical challenges was what made us participate in the RFP in the first place. Of course, we were additionally motivated by our love for Joomla and by our previous long-year experience of hosting thousands of Joomla sites on our own servers. Many people from SiteGround and from the Joomla! community have done some amazing job on the different aspects of this new service like creating the website, designing the templates and developing the extensions. However, in this blog post I will concentrate especially on the technical challenges that our DevOps team encountered while designing, developing and implementing the hosting platform for Joomla.com.
Continue reading “Building The Joomla.com Hosting Platform”

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The CryptoPHP Infection – A Story About Getting Paid Themes and Plugins for Free

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A few of our email servers went wild sending spam this weekend. After quickly fixing the spam issue, we started the longer process of identifying the cause for the spam. It turned out to be the CryptoPHP infection (check out the official whitepaper), activated through a few WordPress themes and plugins.
Continue reading “The CryptoPHP Infection – A Story About Getting Paid Themes and Plugins for Free”

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WP eCommerce Plugin Vulnerability Fixed

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Yesterday Sucuri reported a new vulnerability in WP eCommerce – a popular WordPress plugin for online stores. The vulnerability allows attackers to obtain private information from websites. All versions of the WP eCommerce extension before 3.8.14.4 are vulnerable and attackers may export all user accounts, addresses and other information related to people, who used your site and the plugin to purchase any products from your site.
Continue reading “WP eCommerce Plugin Vulnerability Fixed”

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Time to Say Goodbye to SSL Version 3.0

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It is no secret that securing your client’s data is an ongoing process and not something that you can simply install on a server/platform. That is why security solutions and protocols evolve all the time and developers frequently release new versions. The two cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet are TLS and SSL. The latest version of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL version 3.0) is the predecessor of TLS and is nearly 15 years old. So it was only a matter of time for someone to find the next big issue related to the SSL protocol. Yesterday Bodo Möller from the Google Security Team wrote a blog post about a new vulnerability in the design of SSL version 3.0. The vulnerability allows attackers to calculate the plain text of secure connections.
Continue reading “Time to Say Goodbye to SSL Version 3.0”

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Major Bash Vulnerability Fixed on All Servers

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A major security flaw was discovered in the most popular shell (Bash) which is used by default in many Linux and Unix distributions. A shell is a program that takes your commands (accessing folders, listing files, etc.) that you type and sends them to the operating system to be executed. The Bash vulnerability, also known as Shellshock, allows attackers to issue arbitrary commands via crafted environment variables.
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Updated: WordCamp Europe Coming to Sofia!

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At SiteGround we definitely love WordCamps. We have been involved as sponsors and speakers in many of them lately. However, the upcoming WordCamp Europe is extra special for us. The reason? It will happen in our home city – Sofia! So apart from being just a sponsor, we get the chance to become much more involved this time: we have a ninja volunteer (Tina) in the main organization team of the event; we will welcome the contribution day in our office and we will be able to share our favorite places and pastimes with all the friends, clients and partners coming to town. Below is the list of events that we organize and anyone attending WordCamp Europe can join:
Continue reading “Updated: WordCamp Europe Coming to Sofia!”

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Joomla! Kunena Vulnerability Fixed on all SiteGround Servers

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Critical vulnerability in the famous Kunena forum component for Joomla! were announced three days ago and a new version of the component that addresses the issue was released. According to the official Kunena blog post all extension that are not updated to the latest version are vulnerable and the attackers may use XSS and SQL injection to gain full access to a Joomla! site.

Continue reading “Joomla! Kunena Vulnerability Fixed on all SiteGround Servers”