Hydra and Sofia security shutdown

Access to the HPC clusters of VUB (Hydra, Anansi) and the VSC Tier-1 cluster Sofia is closed for security reasons until further notice.

A new critical vulnerability was just announced that affects our systems. We decided to quickly close all access to our HPC clusters preemptively to avoid any damage on the system and user’s data in it. At the time of closure, no intrusion in the HPC clusters has occurred.

This measure affects all means of accessing our HPC infrastructure:

• SSH connections through the terminal interface

• OnDemand sessions through portal.hpc.vub.be

• Remote sessions with tunneling such as VS Code applications

All active sessions in our clusters have been terminated as well. Compute nodes and the job scheduler will continue to process jobs in the queue. The only jobs canceled are those that involve remote sessions with tunneling through OnDemand.

Users that urgently need to access their data, can do so through the Globus platform. Please check our documentation on VSCdocGlobus if you are not familiar with it.

We are currently working on solving this new critical vulnerability on all our systems as soon as possible. However, we cannot yet provide a timeline for the complete resolution of this issue as we still need to complete our investigation on it. We will keep this post up to date with any progress on this issue.

For any comments or questions, please contact us at VUB-HPC Support.