Service Updates Archives - Tarheel Media Digital Marketing

Maintenance Window

Mike W. — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:48:05 +0000

We will be taking multiple servers offline to transfer the data from 2-6 year old servers to new modern servers. Most websites are affected. The only servers that are not affected is the primary email server and the database server.

We are expecting this update to take about 9 hours but could run longer if a transfer fails and has to be restarted.

Start Time: Sunday, March 30, 2025 @ 1:00 am

Expected End Time: Monday, March 31, 2025 @ 10:00 am

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DDOS Attack on Web Ports

Mike W. — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:18:38 +0000

We are currently seeing a large DDOS attack this morning affecting multiple customer websites. DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. Unlike a single-source DoS, a DDOS uses many source IPs at once, so blocking one address does not stop the attack.

How this attack works

These attacks do not require a server or network vulnerability. Attackers overwhelm resources with legitimate-looking requests to exhaust CPU, memory, connection slots, or packet-handling capacity. Imagine a PO box that receives so much bulk mail in one day the post office must start returning mail because there’s no room — that’s what a DDOS does to a server.

This is what tipped us off:

What we observed

Typical VLAN traffic averages about 35 kbps. During the attack we saw interfaces stuck at 4+ Mbps, which is alarming even though the network can carry more than 10 Gbps. The problem here is packets-per-second that strain routers, not raw bandwidth. If we weren’t using octa-core routers and modern edge filters, some services would have dropped.

All traffic used user-agents reporting Mac 11 and Chrome 87, which we believe are forged. The bulk of requests originated from IP ranges in China, with occasional sources in the U.S., EU, and Russia. Right now they appear to be targeting an American Christian church site for bandwidth exhaustion.

On other sites, such as an office furniture site, attackers retried repeatedly over several hours to force downtime:

Mitigation status

So far we have mitigated the attack and it has not grown in strength. We have seen short bursts since it began, but upstream filters and our edge rules have been effective.

We have collected more than 11,000 IPs making blanket requests. As upstream providers apply filters, the attackers’ effectiveness drops and the attack eases.

The attack pattern looks random across subnets and networks. It does not appear to target a specific site type beyond being U.S.-focused.

UPDATES

5:46 am: Our upstream providers report this may form part of a larger campaign meant to strain United States internet infrastructure. They see similar attacks across many customers.

5:52 am: We have almost entirely neutralized the initial DDOS surge.

11:00 am: Attackers shifted to Slowloris-style tactics, attempting to hold many slow connections and strain servers at the application layer. We adjusted timeouts and connection handling and again mitigated these attempts. The transition is visible below:

3:35 pm: Issue closed. Attacks have ceased and we do not expect further impact to our services at this time.

We will continue to monitor traffic and remain in constant contact with upstream providers. If anything changes, we will post updates here.

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Empty Tomb Celebration: Limited Support and Services

Mike W. — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:09:17 +0000

We will be closed from March 29 until April 1st, 2024 for the celebration of The Empty Tomb. During this time support will be limited to emergency-only support and sales and billing will be closed until April 2, 2024.

CELEBRATING THE EMPTY TOMB!

We wish everyone a happy holiday season!

HE IS RISEN!

Matthew 28:6, Luke 24:6

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Cyno™: A revolutionary way to manage website content

Mike W. — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 12:11:56 +0000

At Tarheel Media, we’re always striving to serve our clients in new and meaningful ways by improving upon our technologies or outright upgrading it to an entirely new technology. For the past 6 months, we have been beta testing a new system of managing websites for end-users (you) that has come to completion. The new system we’re doing, we’ve dubbed Cyno. Cyno does this differently, simply speaking. First, how you edit your website has forever changed.

A NEW WAY TO EDIT

If you’re familiar with our old framework, this one screenshot alone will more than tickle most of our clients. Gone are the days of opening a box and editing text on your website. Now, you simply edit your website just like you would edit a document in a word processor like Microsoft Word. Virtually everything from the header, and the footer, to the content of a page or blog post can be edited or added in the exact same context you just saw.

IT'S A SPEED DEMON!

But that’s not quite all. The powerhouse that Cyno is isn’t just in its editor but in its modular design with you at the helm. That means this new framework is truly scalable to your needs, a genuine one-size-fits-all framework for any website solution. I imagine that sounds a bit odd, so allow me to explain.

Cyno works differently than other frameworks. It has many modules you would need for a website – counters, meters, blog postcards, archives, projects, product pages, image CSS, and JS tricks (lazyload, etc), the works! However, these modules simply don’t load until you’re ready to use them. Then, and only then are they enqueued into the website’s javascript and back-end PHP meaning your website uses fewer resources by using only the resources it needs which means your website runs LEANER and FASTER both on the server and in the client’s web browser! This optimization alone has improved our clients’ websites (and ours) by over 560% by simply not loading modules that aren’t necessary for your solution.

INBUILT SEO

Cyno comes with its own SEO solution using Generative AI to automatically flag content and tag it so search engines know how to better categorize your content. And this all happens without you even knowing.

GETTING UPGRADED

The best thing is, the upgrade to Cyno is likely less expensive than you might think. Only costs us an average of 3 hours per upgrade, the biggest cost will be the per-domain license for other proprietary software we use in this framework which includes our cost in the inclusion and support of premium WordPress plugins such as FileBird which our framework depends on. For less than $400.00, your website will not only look awesome, but you can manage the content in a more meaningful way while preserving its original awesomeness.

For that price, you can expect significant visual improvements to your website as well as new features you can deploy yourself and with little to no design knowledge or web development skill whatsoever.

You can get started by simply contacting us using the Support Center. All new websites are deployed with Cyno.

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Important Update: Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate Changes Affecting Device Compatibility

Mike W. — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 01:23:38 +0000

At Tarheel Media, we prioritize the security and functionality of your websites. That’s why we’re reaching out to inform you of an upcoming change that could impact the compatibility of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with certain devices.

Let’s Encrypt, a trusted provider of free SSL certificates, has been issuing certificates through two chains: the ISRG Root X1 chain and the ISRG Root X1 chain cross-signed by IdenTrust’s DST Root CA X3. The cross-signed chain has been crucial in ensuring widespread trust for Let’s Encrypt certificates across various devices.

However, Let’s Encrypt is now making a vital change that may affect the compatibility of these certificates. Specifically, they are removing the root from the trust store, which could result in older devices – such as those running Android 7 – being unable to use or trust these certificates.

This change is significant as it may impact the security and accessibility of websites, especially for users accessing them from devices that rely on the now-unsupported chain. We understand the importance of ensuring seamless browsing experiences for all users, which is why we want to bring this update to your attention.

As your trusted web development partner, we are here to assist you in navigating through these changes. If you have any concerns or questions regarding your SSL certificates and their compatibility, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that your websites remain secure and functional for all users, regardless of device compatibility challenges.

We appreciate your attention to this matter and your continued trust in Tarheel Media for your web development needs.

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SECURITY BULLITEN: Phishing Fraud and Account Security

Mike W. — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:40:51 +0000

We were alerted yesterday that one of our customers local to Goldsboro, North Carolina had been targeted in a very sophisticated and elaborate phishing scam. Phishing is a fraud that consists of targeting a victim into thinking they are communicating or interacting with a legitimate company in an effort to steal sensitive data such as passwords, financial data, or any other data that in some way benefits the attacker.

As we are aware of this situation, the fraudster contacted our customer masquerading as one of their customers, and when our unsuspecting customer tried downloading an attachment they were asked to enter their Microsoft login details to download the file. Upon doing so, it took only seconds for the pre-programmed bot the fraudster already had in place to login to our client’s Microsoft account and download all the data it could before the customer was notified by Microsoft of a suspicious login.

This kind of breach is the most dangerous because it is a breach into everything on the computer and connected with that Microsoft account including the very login to that PC as Microsoft now requires that all PC logins be “online” and connected to Microsoft’s website.

There are far more implications as well. Because Outlook is also connected to your Microsoft account and login details to our servers are saved in your Outlook, this breach could have also been a breach into our mail server limited and localized to the customer’s email account. That meant the fraudster now could have had access to every email the customer had ever sent to their clients.

Soon after the breach that went unnoticed by the customer, the fraudster created a domain name that mimicked the customer’s domain name. Imagine for a moment if your company’s domain name was “google.com”, and the fraudster registered “google.co” and began emailing the customers of our customer pretending to be our customer. The sophistication of this act was far greater than any breech we’ve been told about to date and we’ve seen some very sophisticated breeches from local businesses right here in Goldsboro.

The fraudster very tediously mimicked everything about the company including the owner’s constant carbon copying of his son in every email, but of course, his son never got that email because it was carbon copied to “sons-name@google.co”.

After 2 weeks of gaining our customer’s customers trust, the fraudster made their move and began requesting the invoices be paid via ACH Debit. One of those customers of our customers reached out to our customer and wanted to know why they could no longer pay their invoices via check. The jig was up when our customer learned that emails were being received he didn’t send.

This is the point I was called. The customer believed that their email had been hacked. We quickly traced this breach back to the Microsoft breach from the phishing email and even found that our own email servers were too hardened for the attacker to break into even with the username and password through Outlook. Instead of logging directly into our email server, they had to resort to creating their own domain name to send emails from.

We want people to be very aware of how these scams work. As you read, paying close attention to the domain name is the best defense against phishing of any kind. Today, it is very hard to deliver email to a domain the email did not come from in an authorized manner because of SPF records, DMARC records, and other security features on DNS servers that alert mail servers to what IP addresses are authorized to send email from that domain name. Our servers are equipped with these security features as well as errant login detection that stops logins that doesn’t seem to be within the norms of a customer’s geographical location for logins. This has proven to be a valid defense which is why the fraudster was unable to login with the customer’s credentials. We are well aware that customers have complained about the minor inconveniences this has seldomly caused, but this security feature really did pay off in a big way in the past few weeks.

In hindsight, it’s always great to go over what went right and what went wrong; the basics of after-action problem solving that I was all too acquainted with from my time in the US Army. This could have been anyone and the likelihood of this happening to someone in the future is many orders higher than you even think – it’s 100%. Don’t think about “if it happens” think about “when it happens”. In this case, the customer made the right call to get help and that should be your first step. Upon contacting us, we’re going to step you through this process, the same process we have outlined in our company policy if we are ever breached:

STOP THE BREACH

Changing passwords, logging out unauthorized users, and securing all of your accounts are essential and nothing else matters until this is completed. I cannot express how important it is to secure the breach before doing anything else at this point, you must shut down the attacker’s access to your company or everything that follows becomes a circular event.

ALERT YOUR CUSTOMERS

It is not only the right thing to do, it is the law. Let your customers know you experienced a data breach and exactly what information you suspect “could have been” obtained – even if there is the slightest chance they got a credit card number, you need to let those customers know “your financial data may have been exposed”. In a situation like what was experienced in this article, education is the best defense and the only immediate way of stopping it. Educating your customers on how to identify a phishing email stops the fraudster’s ability to phish.

ALERT AUTHORITIES

The North Carolina State Attorney General’s office has a hotline specifically for this: 1-877-5-NO-SCAM

ALERT SERVICE PROVIDERS

Filing abuse reports and DCMA takedowns outright disables any further progress from the fraudster. We in addition to a normal abuse report, include a “Letter of Preservation” which notifies the service provider of the fraudster to SAVE ALL DATA associated with that account before deleting it in case the NC Department of Justice prosecutes it. We will file these for our customers, especially if we have active contracts on hand as they allow us and give us the legal authority to do so (a quasi- and very limited power of attorney in these situations).

Note: Our timely abuse reports and DMCA takedowns in this case resulted in total shut-down in less than 6 hours.

REGISTER SIMILAR DOMAINS

In this situation, specifically registering the .co variant to the domain name would have outright prevented this kind of attack on our customer and their customers. This could be a $200 per year expense but it is far cheaper than the liability that could have been caused. We are more than willing to sit down with any customer and go through the variants that should be registered to help prevent an event like this from happening.

EDUCATE YOUR EMPLOYEES

As I said in alerting your customers, education is key, but not just the education of your customers. Ensuring that your employees know how to identify a phishing email effectively removes the most common vector of attack substantially reducing the risk of future breaches of any kind. We will be happy to offer a proactive service to any company to spot-check your employees to see if they can be tricked by a controlled phishing email – an email that does not legitimately represent your company but does not leak data other than to alert someone in your company that the particular employee was tricked and needs to be educated on how to identify these emails.

If you have any questions on this article or on how best to secure your company in data breaches, please visit our support center or call 919-648-1333 option 1.

Copyright Notice EXCLUSIVE to this article: All content and photos in this article may be copied for the purpose of news, awareness, or education so long as it is clear that MLW & Associates, LLC, Tarheel Media’s parent company maintains the copyrights.

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DNS Issue Reported

Mike W. — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 12:29:31 +0000

We are currently aware of a DNS issue that was reported earlier this morning on September 30, 2023. After investigation we realized that Google’s DNS servers are not correctly reporting queries from our name servers, however, all other major providers are. We have submitted a ticket and will keep everyone updated on this post when we know more.

You can use the below link to examine the DNS responses from all other major DNS providers and see that only Google DNS is reporting failures:

https://www.nslookup.io/domains/tarheel.media/dns-records/

Additionally, there is no network block on Google:

Copy to Clipboard

UPDATE

08-30-2023 @ 9:09am – The problem has been resolved through Google Issue Tracker. This ticket is now closed.

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Natural Disaster Preparedness for Hurricane Idalia

Mike W. — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 07:31:29 +0000

As of September 29, 2023, North Carolina Governor, Roy Cooper has declared a State of Emergency for North Carolina ahead of the expected impact of Hurricane Idalia. We are always prepared for any disaster including sudden disasters most wouldn’t expect.

We are continuing to monitor Idalia’s course and its potential impacts on our state. It’s critical for North Carolinians to be fully prepared by watching the forecast and gathering emergency kits.https://t.co/JCZCiLYqDZ

— Governor Roy Cooper (@NC_Governor) August 29, 2023

HOW WE PROTECT YOUR DATA

We use a hybrid system to guarantee power to all servers during power loss. Every server rack has a 30-minute UPS (uninterruptible power supply) which gives us time to spin up the generator. The generator can power both servers and air conditioners and recharge the UPS systems. Our weakest link is Spectrum Enterprise which is our only fiber provider for the entire area.

DATA AFFECTED DURING EXTENDED POWER LOSS

If we lose connectivity to Spectrum Enterprise or they lose connectivity to the internet, some data clusters for our cloud services will not work and some data may not be available such as:

Cold Storage Files (large files and videos or old photos you rarely access)
Statistics Applications (long-term data for stats.tarheel.media)
Any other custom application you may be running on your website (WooFoods, Games, etc)

WHAT WE WILL DO IF WE ARE OFFLINE

While offline there will be nothing we can do until we’re online again. We will do our best to keep you up-to-date via email and updates on this post, so please bookmark this page as soon as possible.

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Service Outage Detected June 15, 2023 @ 0800

Mike W. — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:12:19 +0000

Update @ 0833: This issue is now resolved. Traffic has been switched back to the primary data center and this ticket is closed.

Update @ 0814: The issue was identified as a corrupted route in the router when trying to automatically get routes from the border-gate community.

Update @ 0811 : There was some additional outage with the switching of traffic.

We have detected an intermittent outage on the primary router in Virginia. We have switched traffic to North Carolina until this is resolved. You may notice your website be unresponsive for a few moments when we switch back.

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Server Maintenance & Website Legacy Support End of Life (EOL)

Mike W. — Mon, 22 May 2023 21:52:17 +0000

Last night we performed server maintenance in the form of back-end software updates across the entire network. During this window, we also deployed some custom software and settings that likely gave most customers a 580% performance increase. Most customers went from a B or C Rating on GTMetrics to a solid A rating.

There is a reason why I said most, though. These kinds of updates where the back-end software gets a big upgrade which exposes us to more settings to better optimize a website, en masse, means that some of our client’s older websites simply did not benefit and cannot benefit without an entirely new restructure and re-design of the frameworks that they run on.

For example, Goldsboro Web Development stopped updating websites to PHP 8.0 which ran frameworks built before 2018 back in 2022. Essentially, when PHP updates it can require such a re-write of code that it would not be covered under our update policy. We provide free maintenance and security updates when it is available to us. An update that would break your website or require us to entirely rewrite most of the code is simply not covered and while we’ll support the code for as long as possible it is a good idea to start thinking about upgrading the website if it is placed on End of Life status by us.

As of now, websites created before 2019 are hitting their End of Life for updates to PHP. If we were able to update your website to PHP 8.1, it will be the last time we update your website to a major version of PHP. Now as security updates come out for PHP8.1.x we’ll apply them, without any doubt, but we will not be able to update your website to PHP 8.2 without an entire rewrite of your code, and most certainly PHP 9.x is out of the question.

How can you identify if your website has hit end of life?
Simply log in to your website’s back end, and there will be an alert at the top of every page in the administrator’s control panel.

How urgent is it that you upgrade?
Soon. We could run into an issue we can’t upgrade you out of today, tomorrow, next week, or next year or next decade. When your website hits this status, you’ve pretty much hit that 100,000 mile mark on a vehicle. Anything could go wrong at any time and there are simply no more guarantees that we can fix it for less than what it would take to buy a whole new website.

The question is, how brave are you? If you have a 50-foot ladder and the manufacture advises that the aluminum weakens after 10 years and therefor they cannot be responsible for death or injury and will not warranty the ladder after that period, would you keep using that ladder after 10 years?

Are there any reasons we may shut down the website if you don’t upgrade?
Yes. If your website becomes compromised and WordPress or PHP does not or has not released any security fixes for it, your website will be suspended until you can either pay for an upgrade or pay for us to go through and update the code. Keep in mind that if we’re paid to just fix the code, that doesn’t guarantee this won’t happen the very next day. Once code ages like this it becomes a domino effect simply because updates slow down or stop. To-date we’ve never had to shut down a website even when one customer had a nearly 20 year old website – one of our first! Because we were proactive at blocking many attacks at the network level through packet filtering and application filtering, the only thing that necessitated his upgrade was to bring his website to be mobile friendly and responsive. Because it’s possible doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen, only that it can happen.

How much would a new upgraded website cost?
That’s really the good news. Because you already have a website built by us, your content, images, etc can be directly reused to create nearly 60% to 100% of your new site lowering the price tag from the thousands of dollars to just a few hundred. Depending on your unique website, it could cost $600 or $1600 and getting quotes as low as $400 is not unheard of if your website was fairly simple to begin with.

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