SSL Comodo database glitch

eva2000 · May 20, 2017

Ouch Comodo database glitch had them roll back their database to a 9 day old version Comodo database glitch causes billing problems

While the rest of the world had its eyes firmly on the WannaCrypt outbreak, digital certificate firm Comodo suffered an unrelated but protracted database problem that affected its billing systems.

El Reg learnt of the issue from reader Ian Barber who came across the problem in the process get a new SSL certificate from Comodo activated last Friday (12 May). "It appears that Comodo having some issues. The scary bit is where they say they have restored to a database nine days old," he said to El Reg in reaction to an emailed alert on the issue he received from Comodo (extract below)

We regret to say that, due to a database system error, Comodo’s CA license database is having to be being restored. The initial restore has already taken place and all orders placed before 03-May-2017 12:19:52 UTC are being correctly managed.

Some orders placed after 03-May-2017 12:19:52 UTC may not be obtainable. We are currently working on resolving this. We do understand your situation. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.
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luckily, I just missed this issue by 4 days

Jimmy · May 20, 2017

Nice to see they don't do hourly backups.

Maybe they should invest some of their money in a backup system. 9 days is just crazy for such a large organization.

eva2000 · May 20, 2017

Agreed, 9 days is a long time, they said they tried multiple restores, so I assume more recent backups didn't restore to a state which allowed database to come back up online ? Only the 9 day old backup managed to allow it to come back online !

Jimmy · May 20, 2017

I guess, maybe, they'll start testing their backups on a dev machine to make sure they're good. I can only imagine how many people are going to complain and how many people will be caught off guard when their site is kicking out errors because the cert isn't good. If this happened to my site, being that I'm full SSL, I would've been offline until I got a re-issue.

eva2000 · May 20, 2017

from article i believe the ssl cert system was intact and working it was their billing and ordering database needing restoring. Still inconvenient for those ordering or paying within that 9 day gap !

Updated to add
Robin Alden, Comodo's chief technical officer, has been in touch to say:

We have mirroring capability, which means things are backed up instantly. We also have daily backup on top of mirroring. The issue was that the bug affected the mirroring system as well. Hence, we had to go back to daily backups. These types of database bugs are not like computer crashes. They build up over time. So we had to go back to a time where the database was free of this bug.

The database that holds information on who paid what and when is not related to the ‘certificate database.’ No data was lost there.

There are many sources of data that are enabling us to rebuild the licensing database. It is just an annoyance and will take time, as things have to be carefully checked.

This issue only affects financial records in our licensing system, which could be considered at best as a ‘very low level delay’ to financial records.

There is no connection to WannaCry.
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