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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#29667 New cron jobs appeared

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Backup version
n/a

Latest post by tampe125 on Wednesday, 16 May 2018 10:55 CDT

anotart
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Description of my issue:
This is more a general issue to see if you've ever heard of this before. The information above does pertain to all the sites.

I have a reseller account with Hostgator. I kick off a cron backup on the first of each month for my sites. Out of nowhere, a new cron job showed up, running the same Akeeba job, but on specific days in May (4, 12, 14). I did not add them. I've talked to Hostgator support and this has been escalated to the third level now. I Googled and didn't see anything like this. Every Joomla site I'm hosting had a new backup cron added except one, 1 Wordpress site did not add a new cron job, and three sites without cron did not have one added. Cron jobs unrelated to backup appeared normal and did not have additional jobs added. No one else has access to my WHM or to the specific cPanels.

Have you ever heard of this happening before?

Thank you for any insights you might have.

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Hello,

honestly, no: I've never heard about it.
You should keep in touch with the hosting support, since they're the only ones that can create or delete cron jobs.
I suspect they deployed a new feature that caused some issues.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡นItalian: native ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡งEnglish: good โ€ข ๐Ÿ• My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

anotart
Thank you for your response. They want to charge me $75 to investigate it further. They did tell me they alll were created a year ago (the same date and time they ran this year). I can also see they were created within minutes of each other, which I couldn't do manually. My biggest concern was some kind of evil hack or something.

I'm inclined to just log this and remove the duplicates and move on rather to continue looking into this. Even more inclined after your response. If you think this is important to pursue from a security point of view, can you let me know? Otherwise, I'm done with this.

Thanks so much for your help.

Anne

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Honestly, you can just ignore it.
In order to create CRON jobs, you need to have CLI access with enough privileges. If I were an attacker, the last thing I would do is to just set random CRON jobs to random people, I'd go for more valuable targets.
In my opinion, something broke in CRON admin panel, or they simply restored an old system backup where those jobs were installed.

At the end of the day, it's not a big deal, simply remove it and move along.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡นItalian: native ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡งEnglish: good โ€ข ๐Ÿ• My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

anotart
Hi Davide,

Thank you so much for your help. I appreciate your advice!

Anne

P.S. If you want to make this public in case someone else runs into something like this, I'm find with that.

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
You're welcome!

I'll make this ticket public, so it could help other people, too.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡นItalian: native ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡งEnglish: good โ€ข ๐Ÿ• My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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