Security lockdown of VUB-HPC clusters#

Updated on 06/07/2026

14:00 CEST: Operations on Tier-1 cluster sofia are complete and the system is now available to users. There is no indication that any breach of security has occurred in any of VUB-HPC systems.

Updated on 06/07/2026

09:00 CEST: We already patched the issue on the Tier-2 clusters (Hydra and Anansi) ahead of schedule. Both Tier-2 clusters are again accessible. All jobs that could not finished before Monday morning have been re-queued.

Updated on 05/07/2026

17:00 CEST: We are in the process of deploying the required system updates to fix the security issues disclosed on Friday.

Hydra and Anansi are expected to be fully online by Monday July 6th at 17:00 CEST

Sofia is expected to be fully online by Monday July 6th at 12:00 CEST

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 our HPC clusters has occurred.

This measure includes the following services:

  • 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.