Dear Hosting Customers,
As you have no doubt seen in the news, fundamental architectural flaws were discovered last year in various microprocessors, particularly those manufactured by Intel.
Among others, a team at Google exploited this flaw to devise two different attacks on the confidentiality of applications, which became known as “Spectre” and “Meltdown.”
The impact on our hosting services is such that we must assume, as a general rule, that any information you process on a proServer or Pluspunkthosting server could be viewed by other customers if they are running their applications on the same hardware.
This scenario applies to all products that are “virtual” or “shared”—both in the proServer and Pluspunkthosting offerings. This is not a problem specific to our infrastructure but affects all operating systems as well as the “cloud environments” of established providers.
If you run a dedicated server with us, this issue does not affect you.
The developers of our FreeBSD platform were notified by Intel in December 2017 and are working intensively on a strategy to work around these issues in the operating system. Since the flaws lie in the processor hardware, there is no guarantee that this can be implemented 100%.
As far as is generally known, it is not possible to gain access to your environment via the network or by any other means and alter data or software. This is essentially “only” a confidentiality issue.
We ask that you generally assume that data you process on “shared” infrastructure is, at least potentially, public.
For the processing of personal data with protection level C and higher (according to the Lower Saxony Data Protection Authority), we have always recommended the use of dedicated hardware.
As soon as the relevant operating system updates are available, we will inform you about the planned rollout.
You can find some background information here:
If you have any further questions, our hosting team will be happy to assist you.
