Dear ~okeanos users,

We inform you that from Monday July 27, there is a problem with the ~okeanos storage infrastructure.

Disruptions regarding VM creation and the Pithos storage service might be experienced.

We are working hard in order to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

We apologise for the inconvenience,
the ~okeanos team

Hi ~okeanos users,

Early this month, security researchers reported two critical vulnerabilities: Spectre and Meltdown. These vulnerabilities allow attackers to access sensitive information (such as passwords), due to a design flaw, which affects Intel, ARM and some AMD processors. Specifically, Meltdown allows a process to bypass the mechanisms that isolate it from accessing the memory address space of other processes and the operating system. Respectively, with Spectre a process can access arbitrary memory locations of other related processes.

In order to protect the virtual machines, the physical nodes of ~okeanos have been patched with all the currently available security updates, ... read more

Hi ~okeanos users,

There is a rather dangerous ransomware, the WannaCry / Wcry / WannaCrypt ransomware, that has been spreading since Friday, May 12. The ransomware takes advantage of the MS17-010 vulnerability that affects Microsoft Operating Systems.

In order to protect the virtual machines from exposure to the WannaCry / Wcry / WannaCrypt ransomware, all incoming TCP traffic to ports 137-139 & 445 has been blocked.

The aforementioned firewall rules were applied to partially prevent the ransomware from spreading. Therefore, we urge you to perform all the necessary updates on your Windows virtual machines.

For a more thorough ... read more

Hi ~okeanos users,

A new critical vulnerability in glibc has recently been discovered. This security issue is a stack-based buffer overflow problem, which can be exploited by malicious users to execute code remotely. This affects all Linux systems.

Because of this, we strongly advise you to update immediately the glibc packages in your operating system and restart your virtual machines immediately after the updates.

In order to update Debian and Debian derivative systems you may execute:

and for CentOS/RHEL:

Take care,
the ~okeanos ... read more

Hi ~okeanos users,

As some of you might have heard, a new glibc vulnerability has been found. It has been named GHOST (CVE 2015-0235) and affects most Linux systems. You can find a detailed description of this vulnerability here. From the ~okeanos images that we provide at this moment, the affected ones are the following:

• (K)Ubuntu, prior to version 14.04
• Debian, all versions
• CentOS, all versions
• Oracle Linux, all versions

On our part, we have updated our own systems, but you are strongly advised to update your VMs too [1]. ... read more