---
title: "About GHOST vulnerability"
date: 2015-01-29
author: "Filip Slavik"
featured_image: "https://pressidium.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ghost.fw-1.png"
categories:
  - name: "News & Updates"
    url: "/blog/category/news-updates.md"
url: "https://pressidium.com/blog/ghost-vulnerability/"
---

# About GHOST vulnerability

 A very serious [glibc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library "GNU C Library") vulnerability has been announced on 27th of January by [Qualys researchers](https://community.qualys.com/blogs/laws-of-vulnerabilities "The GHOST Vulnerability") and [CVE-2015-0235](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-0235 "CVE-2015-0235") has been assigned to this issue. The vulnerability is based on a buffer overflow in the library’s internal function `__nss_hostname_digits_dots()` which is used by the `gethostbyname()` and `gethostbyname2()` glibc functions.

## Is WordPress affected ?

WordPress core PHP code could be affected by this vulnerability through the [gethostbyname](http://php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyname.php "PHP gethostbyname") wrapper function which is used in `ftp_base` class and `wp_http_validate_url` function which in turn is used to validate every pingback’s post URL.

Check the following code fragment taken from WordPress `wp-includes/http.php` file :

```
if ( ! $same_host ) {
		$host = trim( $parsed_url['host'], '.' );
		if ( preg_match( '#^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}$#', $host ) ) {
			$ip = $host;
		} else {
			$ip = gethostbyname( $host );
			if ( $ip === $host ) // Error condition for gethostbyname()
				$ip = false;
		}
```

## Are Pressidium customers affected ?

Short answer: **NO 🙂**

At Pressidium, we take security **very** seriously, and as such, after the vulnerability was publicly announced we immediately carried out an internal check on our infrastructure to make sure that the `glibc` library version being used on our servers is not affected by this security vulnerability.

Our checks concluded that all of our systems are using a `glibc` version which is already patched and secured against this buffer overflow. The Pressidium® Pinnacle Platform and all of our customer’s WordPress websites are **not** affected by this serious vulnerability.

Job done.

Host your WordPress Website with Pressidium!

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