Hosting Provider Automatically Fixes Vulnerabilities In Customers' Websites

An anonymous reader writes "Dutch hosting provider Antagonist announced their in-house developed technology that automatically detects and fixes vulnerabilities in their customers' websites. The service is aimed at popular software such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. 'As soon as a vulnerability is detected, we inform the customer. We also explain how the customer can resolve the issue. In case the customer does not respond to our first notice within the next two weeks, we automatically patch the vulnerability.' Antagonist plans to license the technology to other hosting providers as well."

Comments

Re:Why not fix it immediately?

[sabri]

In two weeks it might be too late.

You're talking about customer data here. They may have some customizations in the code that break if you allow yourself to patch it.

I would take another approach: disable the vulnerable file until the customer fixes it. By fixing it for them you may generate expectations which you'll not be able to match in the long run: "don't worry about software updating, the hosting company will do it for us".

Re:Thanks for your help

[Njovich]

At this point, if you want control over your site you can easily run some kind of VPS. If you use shared hosting, do you really want to share your server with a bunch of vastly outdated joomla and wordpress sites? This constitutes the majority of sites on your average shared hosting provider... leading to potential escalations to other sites (not always true, but it's possible), being used to host or send spam, leading to blacklisting of the server on spam lists etc.