ETC Blog, The Tech Resource
Thrive Theme Vulnerability Allows unauthentic Remote Takeover Of WordPress Sites
Wordfence discovered these vulnerabilities in the Thrive Theme had been silently patched on March 12th. As of the 23rd many sites using this theme and it's associated packages were still not updated. Further analysis discovered two vulnerabilities than when used...
Some Android Devices Experiencing Performance Problems. Google Release a fix..That’s Only Part of the Story.
So a story is going around about an Android component update...however it's mainly the non-pixel phones that are being affected. All other android vendors install other software in addition to just Android. Int he case of Samsung it's android, then Samsung's software,...
Elementor Site Builder Plugin Vulnerability Announcement
The wildly popular Elementor site builder plugin has a vulnerability that can allow a third party site to secretly compromise a Wordpress site if the user is logged into the site as the administrator. Normally when you are on one site..a third party site is blocked...
A New Research Project Begins
With the completion of my ransomware resistance storage research and product announcement, I have now embarked on a new research project. I am looking for an open source virtualization host. I have already tried XCP-NG and I just could not get it to work...
Major Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability in Elementor Plugin Leads to Site Takeovers
A plugin for the Elementor sitebuilder has a major vulnerability that allow remote attackers to create administrative accounts without any need for authentication. The admin users can then do anything a Wordpress user can do which is add or remove content, create or...
Netgate Announces Move Away From PFSense..I Begin my Move Towards Something Else
Right as I start building a firewall monitoring and configurations service...things change drastically. Luckily, as a smaller company I am able to be quite agile in responding. I had heard rumblings of something a couple of weeks ago...now those rumblings have been...
It’s Time to Stand for the Constitution in Business
If you are a person with a tactical site or other pro-2A site you have a friendly refuge here. I can do domain registration, hosting, dedicated servers, and server co-location. DMCA notices are PROPERLY handled within the bounds of the law (unlike many other places)....
When Hardware Gets a Mind of It’s Own: R520 Fan Edition
I have had a Dell R520 server here at my location for a bit now and it's been a great upgrade for my business. In addition to providing network storage it also has been the final testbed for my new network attached storage product I recently announced. I have been...
Windows 20h2 Bug Eats Partitions, TrueNAS Core Saves Data Again
I had 1909 on my machine and it decided to upgrade to 20h2(mainly because i forgot to disable feature updates after some windows maintenance). Things immediately went downhill from there. I knew something was funky when it kept saying my E drive(my iscsi gamecache)...
The SolarWinds Compromise is Worldwide in Nature(Podcast)
This is the first in a series of podcasts about the SolarWinds hack. As details come out I will be making more podcasts and providing links in futher posts. Hang on folks..it's going to be a fun ride. You can download the podcast episode here. Here's the linklist i...
ETC Maryland Interviewed About Web Hosting
Nathan Neil interviewed me about my hosting product. It's about 25 minutes long. We talk about why I started my company, my hosting products, how I am different. We also talk about the value I present in the hosting space and how my attention to detail gives me the...
The end of CentOS and my moving to BSD.
RedHat announces the death of CentOS. To quote the article: In the past, CentOS has been a community build of the current RHEL source, providing a robust production distro for those willing to do without Red Hat support. When RHEL gets a fix, the project aims to have...
ETC Maryland Officially Announces Affordable, Ransomware Resistant Network Storage for Micro and Small Businesses
Remember this post? This has been 4 years in the making. I have tested this extensively at my office and at a clients remote location. With ransomware going nuts I am targeting this launch towards protecting against ransomware and offering an affordable, onsite...
Comcast Adds Data Caps to its Northeastern Residential Service Area
Comcast released a website that says they are capping residential at 1.2 Terabytes of data usage. If you go over it's $10/month per 50 gigabytes. Your maximum overage charge is $100/month. At least Comcast is not trying to say it's for network management. This is...
UEFI Being Used to House Nearly Unremovable Malware. Warned About in 2015.
ZDNET has a concerning article about UEFI malware found on some PC's. According to the article this most recent UEFI infection was not the first. The Russian APT group Fancy Bear was using it back in 2018. Things like this usually means you can count on at LEAST 1...
ETC Maryland Stance on Hosting Software
ETC Maryland takes server security seriously. One way ETC Maryland provides is to make sure the Linux version used are Long Term Support releases. This maintains the code base at a set level. This also means a reduced bug count and increased system stability. ...
Fully Managed Hosting Testimonial
I recently posted about a web hosting client that got their site compromised and how another web developer was wanting what I feel is an exorbitant amount of money for their offered service. I have received a testimonial from the primary web developer of that site:...
When Your Web Designer Scams You “Fixing” Your Hacked Site
There are some serous ripoff artists out there. I have a acupuncturist who hosts with me on micro and her site got compromised...due to old outdated plugins. Her web programmer said he'd fix it for 75/month recurring. So what did this person do for two months? Nothing...
Rapid Dev and the Associated Defects Strike Again..
“Rapid development" strikes again. FreeNAS has gone down that route and the results are quite predictable. The last 2 releases since their announcement of their new dev model have had at least one regression each..u3 had two of them..including an error they introduced...
Another Breach by “Sophisticated” Hackers
The UN had a massive breach of its systems that was only recently disclosed. Of course, in an effort to deflect accountability, the tired sophisticated, or saying it was a nation state was trotted out. This is total rubbish. If you have known vulnerabilities and...
Another client “Unified” and Properly Segmented
This is a client that has become a very loyal client. For the longest time their network had no real segmentation. Their Cc machine was on the same network as the wifi guest network and all of them were on the same subnet as their main internal network. That's bad...
Ubuntu LTS Livepatch: More Security Updates With Less Downtime
ETC Maryland has enabled the Ubuntu Kernel Livepatch service. This means the amount of times the servers will have to reboot for kernel updates will be reduced by more than 95%. Only in the rare occurrence when a kernel update is too major to be done without rebooting...
Cybersecurity Mission Execution: Failed
oh yes we always see this when a breach occurs: "Safeguarding our customer’s information is core to our mission. We are committed to protecting our customers against misuse of their information and have invested heavily in cybersecurity," Network Solutions says. "We...
Another Client Unified
I REALLY like the Unifi line by Ubiquity. For the vast majority of small business needs it has everything you need without the high price tag of Meraki/Cisco and other vendors. This is a very long time client who has a local accounting business. For the longest...
The Reason ETC Maryland Chose Virtualmin
It took a long time for me to settle on a control panel for all of the ETC Maryland hosting offers. There are the big ones like Cpanel, Plesk and others. I saw their pricing and I also trialed them on the servers I was going to start my hosting business on. They...