'400 Bad Request' Error when trying to preview product

[epools]

Good Morning everyone or whatever the time may be, I am having a problem with the Product decription box in the 'edit product' screen

I do a lot of cutting and pasting into that section and most of the time it works fine, but recently it has been giving me this error when trying to 'preview' the product:

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Apache/2.2.0 (Redhat) Server at epools.com.au Port 80

it was working fine since Saturday (19th) but since Friday (25th) it has been giving me that error for apparently pasting text with things like:

• bullet points
• punctuation such as quotation marks and apostrophes
• text with more then one space between them

This never used to happen as of a week ago the only problem i had before was pasting special characters ie U's with the two dots on the top, i am only able to preview the product after i have deleted all the pasted bullets, I have also noticed that the products which i have previously entered I am not able to "preview" them either.

I called up our hosting company 'Telefa' and they said they had just applied an update and were trying to fix a few errors with permissions. I explained the problem to them and they sent me this reply:

"Please see the response from our server manager:

Zencart and old versions of Joomla have come under a lot of scrutiny recently as they basically keep getting hacked and compromising the server. The guys have been locking these processes out to protect the server and all the other clients on there. You’ll need to advise the client to make sure that the security patches are all up to date as any old vulnerable versions will be blocked as they will eventually get hacked."

I get the idea that installing the latest security patch may help, though we are using Zen Cart 1.3.8a so it may already be on there i'm not exactly sure what he means by "You’ll need to advise the client to make sure that the security patches are all up to date" though.

I would just like to know if anyone has had this problem in the past & also if this is more a problem with hosting rather then zen-cart.

Thank you for your help

# Using version: Zen Cart 1.3.8a
# Site: www.epools.com.au
# Hosting Company: Telefa http://www.telefa.com.au/