Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset (dreamhoststatus.com)

158 pointsby greenchaira day ago62 comments

duskwuff 18 hours ago

Reading the tea leaves: given that the outage started with "connectivity issues affecting the File Manager", which was an install of Monsta FTP [1] - a commercial PHP application - I suspect the file manager got popped by one of the recently published PHP vulnerabilities, and users' FTP credentials may have been exfiltrated.

[1]: https://www.monstaftp.com/

MuffinFlavored 18 hours ago

hopefully their hashed/salted passwords, right? not plaintext?

duskwuff 18 hours ago

Internally, sure. But the application that was (probably) compromised was an FTP client, so it would have received the plain text of those passwords from users as they logged in.

trollbridge 17 hours ago

For those customers who are still logging in with FTP…

As a precaution they reset everyone’s email passwords, presumably from an assumption people use the same ones for both.

I’m surprise they still let people use FTP.

jacquesm 16 hours ago

I came across such a thing recently. The counterparty was a bank, and they point blank refused to update their processes so the people I talked to had no choice but to continue to use something they knew was hopelessly outdated. SFTP was released what, 3 decades ago or so? There is a good chance that whatever was on the other side of that upload was not capable of any kind of secure connection.

bawolff 11 hours ago

I dont really see a problem with ftp over TLS. The protocol might be dated, but it still works fine.

spopejoy 10 hours ago

> the application that was (probably) compromised was an FTP client

Thank you, this actually makes some sense. It's disturbing to get these emails with zero explanation what's going on, and very frustrating that user community has to guess. But PHP vuln in a web client intercepting user logins is the only thing that makes sense, otherwise that would mean passwords in the clear or some other 1990s-era nonsense.

traeregan 17 hours ago

20 year customer here. This morning I asked their support chatbot if this is related to the PHP vulnerabilities and it assured me that's not the case. I'm skeptical.

These status updates from the PHP incident would also have us believe that they were never directly affected: https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/pages/incident/575f0f6068263...

They're being awfully vague about this issue so far. 8 hours ago I submitted a ticket requesting more information and they've not responded yet. I guess that they're still in the thick of it.

pixl97 16 hours ago

Why would their support chatbot know?

Having worked in support for years quite often higher layers of the company will give T1 support almost no information on what happened intentionally. That's pretty standard corporate CYA policy in litigious societies.

traeregan 15 hours ago

I didn't think that it would know but their support UX funnels you through it so that's where I started. I followed it up with a ticket.

nkrisc 12 hours ago

I would never expect first tier support to know, let alone ever admit, something like that.

nikanj 3 hours ago

Asking the chatbot is as useful as asking the pet parrot.

juliusdavies 7 hours ago

DH patched all their PHP versions extremely quickly.

joshstrange 2 hours ago

I got the email about this and realized I’ve been using them for just shy of 20 years. It was one of the original places I hosted things and where I hosted projects for other people. I haven’t actively used it years but migrating the last few things off has never been a priority. This might be the push I need to re-evaluate everything hosted there and shut down or migrate it all.

zoidb an hour ago

Yeah same here! I dont pay them any money but I still have an account there. For awhile I let my domains sit there until I realized that it was cheaper to move them to Cloudflare

paulbjensen 17 hours ago

Dreamhost - gosh that brings back memories…

blocked_againnn 14 hours ago

000webshost anyone? Also .tk domains.

SteveNuts 12 hours ago

Freewebs!

phantompeace 12 hours ago

Only real ones remember 110MB

LoganDark 10 hours ago

Hey, I used both of those! Those were fun days. When DotTK moved to "Freenom" though, that's when it really started to go to shit.

lexwhite 10 hours ago

This has been a real annoyance for me lately since I run a lot of my music production business out of my website lexwhite.net hosted on Dreamhost and Dreamhost VPS. I love and trust Dreamhost a lot, though, as they have been an exceptionally solid company that I have worked with for, dang, nearly 20 years now I think! All of this new AI stuff has been exposing vulnerabilites at a rate that is hard to keep up with for anyone. We just have to really harden our cybersecurity as much as possible now.

xmddmx 10 hours ago

Super displeased with DreamHost's handling of this. I have multiple master accounts. One of them got the email around 12pm today (over 48 hours after the incident started) saying...

"As a precaution, we have expired the passwords for some email and FTP/SFTP users on your DreamHost account. Their old passwords no longer work, and no new password has been set."

But none of those email passwords were actually expired - all were working. This is confusing - did they only expire passwords that were under threat? If a password wasn't expired, should it be trusted?

The same email suggests you change all email passwords you control.

Another account received no email warning from DreamHost so I assumed it was fine, but 7 hours later it also received the same generic email.

My complaints:

- sucks that it took them 48 hours to identify the breach - perhaps understandable

- but once the breach was identified, how the fuck does it take them over 7 rolling hours to email their customers? That's terrible.

- confusing messaging: DreamHost are claiming that passwords are expired, but in testing multiple accounts, all of them are still working. Do I need to rotate these? (I probably will just for safety).

I'm a 25+ year DreamHost customer and generally satisfied, but this feels like amateur hour.

dannyw an hour ago

For emails over 7 rolling hours, unless you're e.g. Google or Microsoft, you kinda have to, otherwise those systems will automatically shadowban (send-to-spam) you for excessive/abnormal email sending rates. It's not great.

It also doesn't help that a lot of scammers use this, or fake cyber incidents, for phishing; so it's not like they have an easy solution for exempting "security emails" either.

hmokiguess 16 hours ago

I migrated all my stuff from dreamhost about 5 years ago, got this email today and felt validated from having made that decision.

mistersquid 13 hours ago

> I migrated all my stuff from dreamhost about 5 years ago

May I ask to where you migrated?

rationalist 10 hours ago

Dreamhost is no longer the hosting company that I originally signed up for. I'm also looking for a different host.

I might have been willing to stick it out, but their panel/website-management is so slow.

dieselgate 10 hours ago

Porkbun has been fine, used dreamhost for years prior

elevation 9 hours ago

I love their shared hosting; I have a $100/year account with dozens of little low traffic apps in their own subdomain/user isolation. They maintain the OS, I maintain the app, I can pull code with git and even compile a python interpreter if I need.

I love that I have infinite/unmetered email accounts. In practice I run 3-4 accounts on 2-4 domains, but they don't nickel and dime you on it, I've literally setup 1200 forwarders in the past. They have a good sending reputation.

What other provider does this as well?

whyage 19 hours ago

What's going on with Dreamhost lately? Is it falling apart?

AznHisoka 18 hours ago

I havent seen anyone talk about it for the last 10-15 yrs. I would have guessed it fell apart already

PaulDavisThe1st 17 hours ago

They abandoned all support for email lists a couple of months back. Will likely move after 20+ years on DH.

trollbridge 17 hours ago

Chat support works well. Email is nonexistent.

PaulDavisThe1st 16 hours ago

I don't mean "support for using mailing lists". I meant "they no longer provide the services (i.e. mailman) to run mailing lists"

trollbridge 15 hours ago

Nobody wants to run a service like that anymore.

james_in_the_uk 14 hours ago

Topicbox.com, from the team behind Fastmail

bigiain 14 hours ago

i wouldn't be so sure. I know I move in privacy and "anti big tech" circles, but I (and a lot of people I know) am moving a lot of my personal/recreational internet time to rss feeds of personal websites, mailing lists, and Mastodon. And there's a fair bit of discussion and small but growing use of private and very small group federated Mastodon hosts.

Having said that, very little of that is being done by the sort of people who'd host it on a service like Dreamhost.

cowlevel 10 hours ago

Mailing lists are inherently dangerous as you can be marked as a spammer.

LoganDark 10 hours ago

Everyone (and I mean everyone) is a spammer by default these days, so this is no problem in practice.

danielmeskin 13 hours ago

I mean, clearly the person you’re replying to does

forgotmypw17 18 hours ago

Working pretty well for me.

donohoe 17 hours ago

Same. Into my second decade with them. Great value, no real complaints.

trollbridge 17 hours ago

No, they’re still doing well.

Support is primarily via chat these days.

Pricing wise they don’t beat Herzner anymore but are somewhat competitive with Digital Ocean.

I am gradually moving everyone to my own self hosting mostly for supportability reasons. We want to react in seconds, not hours, when a customer has an issue.

beej71 11 hours ago

I'm still at DH (have been for 20 years), but taking a peek at Hetzner... seems compelling at 30% cheaper than I pay now.

cowlevel 10 hours ago

Just be warned Hetzner will delete your account at the slightest sign of controversy. It's fine for Minecraft but I wouldn't want to host a political website there.

monster_truck 11 hours ago

I used them for entirely too long, and only continued to do so because a classmate in high school used my referral code to sign up for the account that would become his career of selling and managing websites for local churches.

I could not believe what the hell they were charging for a year of hosting with a dedicated ip (which they at the time required if you wanted https, real scumfuck move), so I didn't pay.

I guess I hope they actually deleted my shit because I sure didn't get this email

rstupek 9 hours ago

How long ago was that because at the beginning you did have to dedicate an IP for https prior to SNI

forgotmypw17 18 hours ago

Ah, I noticed this yesterday, figured it was just me.

therein 18 hours ago

Now that's a blast to the past. What's next, Rapidshare.de is having issues?

tuwtuwtuwtuw 17 hours ago

Angelfire shut down this year so not them at least.

dvdyzag 11 hours ago

Dang, memory unlocked

jamesfinlayson 9 hours ago

Counting down until you can download again...

I do not miss those days.

pixel_popping 6 hours ago

Remember when they put that 25GB daily limit vs MU unlimited, that was the start of its death.