Today (March 15 2019) saw the public disclosure of a new security vulnerability in Intel processors related to Microarchitectural Data Sampling, or MDS (also known as ZombieLoad). Similar to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, this new vulnerability could in some circumstances allow a skilled attacker access to data they would not have access to under normal circumstances, as well as potential privilege escalation.
We are working with Intel and our hardware vendors to investigate the performance impact of any mitigations and roll out updates to mitigate against this vulnerability for our customers. We’ll be in touch with regard to any upcoming maintenances that relate to this work.
This is a timely reminder to ensure your server is up to date - the latest kernels for Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS as well as Windows patches from Microsoft include updates related to MDS and we encourage all our customers to update where they can. Cloud Container customers: if you are on this product we’ll handle the updates for you. Based on the disclosed information it is our understanding that products with shared CPU cores are at the highest risk, with those products using dedicated CPU cores (such as dedicated servers and VDS) being unaffected. Those customers on our AMD hardware are also unaffected.
We want to assure you that we’re taking this latest disclosure very seriously and will be working hard to ensure our customers are protected. We will be updating customers with further information when we can, but if you have specific questions or concerns please get in touch with our support team.