On December 17th, Mozilla received an email from a third party notifying the company of a file that contained user records that was posted to a public web server. The information in this file listed users email, addressses, first and last names, and MD5 password hashes.

The Company relied through an email stating “We immediately took the file off the server and investigated all downloads. We have identified all the downloads and with the exception of the thrid party who reported the issue, the file has been downloaded only by Mozilla staff.”

Since the the company has removed the passwords from their site and are asking users to reset their passwords for all content used through Mozilla. “We have identidied the process which allowed this file to be posted publicly and have taken steps to prevent this in the future. We are also evaluation pther processes to ensure your information is safe and secure” the email also declared.
Chris Lyon, directore of infrastructure security at Mozilla, said on Decemeber 27th through a blog post, that the file included 44,000 inactive accounts using older, MD5 pasword hashes. The company erased the MD5 passwords, leaving the accounts inactive. Lyon also stressed that current users employ a more secure SHA-512 password hash with per-user salts and therefore are “not at risk.”

Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos Canada, addresses the problems with MD5 passwprd hashes” “MD5 has cryptographic weaknesses that permit creation of the same hash from multiple strings. This permit securty experts to compute all the possible hashes and determine either your password or another string that will work even if it is not your password.” Chester commened Mozilla’s response to the incident but questions how the company accidentall published this information to begin with and why MD5 password hashes were still in the system.

“If you are a web site administrator or developer, are you still storing passwords using methods like Gawkwer(DES) or Mozilla(MD5)? We know they are broken, and it is important to migrate away from these algorithms in case you have a database accidentally make its way outside of your orginization,” Wisniewski summarized.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen refile a patent infringement lawsuit against several companies on Tuesday. This was just shy of the December 28th deadline for refiling the case given by the court. The original case had been thrown out of court in early december after U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman declared that the complaint was too vague after stating “the allegations in the complaint are spartan.”  The amended suit includes details that were not included into the original filing, and also hosts 40 displays showing the alleged patent infringement in action according to the Seattle Times. The companies named in the lawsuit among Apple are Google, Facebook, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, Youtube, Netflix, and eBay.

Allen’s Interval Licensing filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Interval Research Coporation, a company Paul co-founded in 1992. Interval Research closed in 2000, but the patents are still active and under Paul Allen’s close scrutiny. The patents that Mr. Allen hope to protect outline “a broswer for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audio visual data” an “attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device” and a system for “alerting users to items of current interest.”

PacificHost, LLC a cPanel based web hosting company announced earlier today that the company has had a 23% increase in server density on their shared servers by introducing CloudLinux OS. The added stability features from CloudLinux have helped them achieve their goals to offer a secure and reliable hosting service to their customers.

Barely a month after PacificHost’s crucial decision to shift platform and utilize the CloudLinux OS in all its shared and reseller servers, there has already been a considerable increase in performance and reliability. This includes an 11% decrease in support volume due to resource abuse and a 12% increase in productivity in tracking down resource abuse issues. CloudLinux’s unique LVE technology allows PacificHost to split each customer into their own virtual container and assign resources to each user, while also ensuring that they only use those allotted resources.

CloudLinux is an OS that is designed to isolate users in a shared web hosting environment, allowing for greater efficiency. By creating a virtual environment for each hosting account, CloudLinux averts excessive use of all server resources by any particular user, at any given time. This exclusive isolation technology prevents any individual from slowing down the server – or in severe cases, even taking the entire server offline. This is a common problem for other hosting providers that haven’t yet discovered the benefits of using CloudLinux OS.

“PacificHost utilizes CloudLinux as the foundation for our shared hosting. We always ensure that all our servers are optimized and secured from the get-go but CloudLinux helps provide that extra bit of performance and reliability we are known for,” said Thomas Perry, PacificHost President and CEO. He added, “CloudLinux never fails to impress us with its ability to divide system resources among many customers and prevent slowdowns caused by abusive users. We save approximately $850 per month when all factors are considered which makes CloudLinux well worth it.”

About PacificHost

Established in 1999, PacificHost is now known as the leading provider of the highest quality, feature-rich cPanel Website Hosting and cPanel Reseller Hosting services. It provides the perfect website development and E-commerce solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. The company is fully committed to provide customers with nothing but the most fully-featured and best-quality services at fair and affordable prices, inclusive of 99.9% guaranteed uptime, 24/7/365 Award-winning USA-based customer support and a 45-day Money Back Guarantee.

For more information about PacificHost, please visit http://www.pacifichost.com.

About CloudLinux

Founded in 2009, CloudLinux was developed to address the unique needs of hosting service providers in an ever-changing market. It is a stable, privately funded company headquartered in Princeton, NJ with its development team based in Donetsk, Ukraine. The people behind the company have significant experience in the hosting business and datacenter market; thus, realized early on that they could fill the market gap by providing an OS with better support at an affordable price. CloudLinux provides the ideal OS to make complex and often contradictory hosting needs a lot simpler and easier. The cutting-edge CloudLinux technology is proven to provide rock-solid and reliable hosting services while driving the costs down.

For more information about CloudLinux, please visit http://www.cloudlinux.com.

French Web hosting provider OVH (www.ovh.co.uk) will be able to continue hosting WikiLeaks for the time being after two courts have said they will need more time to further analyze the issue.

The judges said Tuesday they are not yet able to make a ruling on the highly technical case.

French Web hosting provider OVH called on two courts Friday to rule on whether it was legal for it to continue providing hosting services for the whistle-blower website.

The French government had requested that the site be removed from French servers.

WikiLeaks has been hosting the site on OVH since Thursday after it was dropped by US-based DNS providers, and disconnected by its direct DNS supplier EveryDNS.

WikiLeaks made headlines last week after it published more than 250,000 confidential US diplomatic memos.