Wednesday morning, the 21st of October, was one of those mornings when you knew your plan for the day was obsolete before the day even started.

Even though the Vodia PBX itself doesn't use PHP, some of our backend servers do, and these servers needed patching following a critical PHP security advisory affecting PHP installations worldwide. As a precautionary measure, we disabled public access and began the necessary upgrades. As so often happens, one upgrade led to another, requiring configuration changes for incompatible upgrades and, in the end, what began as a single upgrade took several hours. Public access has been restored, and the affected services are operating normally.

One change we had long wanted to make was retiring www.vodia.com as an address used for license purposes. We rarely press customers to upgrade, but we feel it’s time for those versions of our PBX using this address for license purposes to upgrade - if you are one of these users, please contact us so we can determine the best version for your upgrade.

The other change we had long wanted to make was retiring TLS 1.1. Our PBX builds have supported TLS 1.2 for a very long time, but if you are on a version that doesn’t support TLS 1.2, please contact us: if you use the Vodia email service, you may notice email issues immediately; if you are just refreshing the license, it might take a few days before you can see if the refresh worked.

Most firewalls will be happy about these changes, as TLS 1.1 is deprecated in most environments. The IP addresses for the servers remain the same, and we don’t expect any need to reconfigure firewalls in the wake of these changes.

Even though the incident didn’t directly affect the PBX, it does remind us we need to be prepared for unexpected incidents. The rise of AI has brought new bugs into play, adding to that challenge. Our heightened awareness will help us continue to improve the quality of our software while keeping a careful eye on the use of AI by bad actors to exploit software vulnerabilities as they are published.

Most PBX versions are unaffected by these changes. However if your server is still running a version build before 2018, please contact us to check if the PBX needs to be updated.

We are always available to answer questions or address concerns, so please reach out at sales@vodia.com if you need assistance. And here’s hoping today is a better day than yesterday.