Automating Compliance: Surviving Shellshock and Datatilsynet Audits Without Losing Sleep

It has been exactly five days since the Shellshock (CVE-2014-6271) vulnerability was disclosed. If you are a systems administrator managing a fleet of servers and you are still patching them manually, you have arguably already failed. The window between vulnerability disclosure and active exploit is shrinking to hours. In this environment, "ssh-ing in" to run yum update is not a strategy; it is a liability.

For those of us operating out of Norway, the stakes are compounded. We are not just battling script kiddies scanning for vulnerable Bash versions; we are operating under the strict supervision of Datatilsynet (The Norwegian Data Protection Authority) and the Personopplysningsloven (Personal Data Act). Data leakage due to negligence isn't just an uptime issue; it is a legal nightmare.

This post is not about generic security advice. It is a war report from the last 96 hours of patching, and a blueprint for using automation to harden your Linux infrastructure against the next inevitable zero-day, while keeping your data firmly on Norwegian soil.

The Reality of 2014: Perimeter Security is Insufficient

We used to rely on the firewall. If port 80 and 443 were the only things open, we felt safe. Shellshock destroyed that illusion. This vulnerability attacks through CGI scripts, DHCP clients, and even restricted SSH shells. It bypasses the perimeter entirely.

If you haven't tested your stack yet, stop reading and run this in your terminal right now:

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"

If you see the word vulnerable in the output, your server is wide open to arbitrary code execution. If you see warnings or just "this is a test", you have likely applied the initial patches released on September 24th.

The "Norwegian Fortress" Approach

When we deploy high-availability clusters for financial or healthcare clients in Oslo, we cannot rely on standard US-centric security policies. Safe Harbor is shaky ground, and data residency matters. Here is the architecture we strictly adhere to at CoolVDS to ensure compliance with local regulations:

1. Physical Residency: Data never leaves the Oslo datacenter.
2. Kernel Isolation: We use KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). Unlike OpenVZ (popular with budget providers), KVM ensures that a kernel panic or exploit in a neighbor's VM cannot bleed into your memory space. This is non-negotiable for compliance.
3. Automated Configuration Management: We treat infrastructure as code.

Implementing Automated Hardening with Ansible

Puppet and Chef are powerful, but they require agents. For rapid remediation—like pushing a Bash patch to 50 servers in 2 minutes—Ansible is the superior tool right now (specifically version 1.7). It is agentless and runs over SSH.

Here is a pragmatic Ansible playbook we used this week to patch the Shellshock vulnerability and harden the sysctl configurations across our CentOS 6 fleet.

The Playbook (`secure_stack.yml`)

---
- hosts: norway_production
  user: root
  tasks:

  - name: Ensure Bash is updated (Mitigate CVE-2014-6271)
    yum: name=bash state=latest

  - name: Harden network stack against IP spoofing
    sysctl: name={{ item.key }} value={{ item.value }} state=present reload=yes
    with_items:
      - { key: 'net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route', value: '0' }
      - { key: 'net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route', value: '0' }
      - { key: 'net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts', value: '1' }
      - { key: 'net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians', value: '1' }

  - name: Disable root SSH login
    lineinfile: dest=/etc/ssh/sshd_config regexp="^PermitRootLogin" line="PermitRootLogin no" state=present
    notify:
      - restart ssh

  handlers:
    - name: restart ssh
      service: name=sshd state=restarted

Running this script is simple:

This does three things instantly: patches the vulnerability, prevents IP spoofing (a common attack vector on shared networks), and locks down SSH access. Doing this manually on ten servers takes an hour. Doing it on a hundred takes a week. With Ansible, it takes 45 seconds.

Pro Tip: Always set vm.swappiness to 10 or lower in /etc/sysctl.conf on your database servers. By default, Linux sets this to 60, which causes the kernel to swap out application memory too aggressively. On high-performance setups, this creates latency spikes that look like packet loss but are actually disk I/O blocking.

The Hardware Factor: Why I/O Wait Kills Security Scans

Security compliance isn't just about software; it's about overhead. Running ClamAV scans, rkhunter checks, and log analysis (ELK stack) generates massive disk I/O.

On traditional spinning HDD VPS hosting, a scheduled security scan can drive your Load Average through the roof, causing 502 Bad Gateway errors for your users. This forces admins to make a terrible choice: disable security logs to save performance, or suffer downtime.

This is why we standardized on Pure SSD storage at CoolVDS. We are not talking about SSD-caching; we mean full SSD arrays. The random read/write speeds allow you to run aggressive audit logging (auditd) and intrusion detection systems without degrading the performance of your Nginx or Apache processes.

Comparison: Scan Impact on Load Average

Conclusion: Compliance is a Process, Not a Checkbox

The Personopplysningsloven mandates that you secure personal data with "planned and systematic measures." Relying on manual updates is neither planned nor systematic—it is reactive. By moving to an automated Ansible workflow and hosting on infrastructure that isolates your kernel (KVM) and supports high I/O concurrency (SSD), you turn compliance from a headache into a background process.

The next vulnerability is already being written. Ensure your infrastructure is ready to patch it in seconds, not days.

Don't risk data residency or I/O bottlenecks. Deploy a secure, KVM-isolated instance on CoolVDS today and keep your data safely in Norway.