My webhost has informed me of a security issue with their systems. Evidently a member was able to gain sufficient privileges to change their account balance (( Service with the host is pre-paid, so members must maintain a balance with the host. )), which is obviously bad. Fortunately, they have logs that detail the intrusion, understand how it occurred, and are working on a fix.
They report that the security problem appears to be limited to their administrative systems, not customer sites, but that they may need to do rolling reboots over the next day or so to push out the fix. Any downtime for the next day or two is likely related to that.
This reminds me (and should serve as a reminder to you) that one should keep regular, off-site backups that can be restored to a different host if the need arises. In addition to this blog, I also maintain several other sites with this one host, so extended downtime (which I’ve fortunately never experienced — the host is routinely excellent) would be problematic.
Whee.