Why does notice.php try to connect to apistats.net

Yes, there is a strong reason for that, it’s help to make plugin work much better, also there’s no security issue, you can check the code by yourself. When you installed the plugin you saw the license agreement and you accepted it.

Is there a reason why our servers got stalled only this morning, one week after plugins/menu-image/notice.php was updated.

It was only fixed when apistast.net was blocked on Firewall.

This caused a few sites to go down for me as well. Why are you accessing an external site in such a way? What’s the quickest way to disable it?

Since it appears this is a now defunct plugin, just for anyone else’s reference, you can comment out three lines in the main menu-image.php file:

Line 33: require_once( 'notice.php' ); to //require_once( 'notice.php' );
Lines 98-99: $this->notice = new AccelioNotice(); to //$this->notice = new AccelioNotice();
$this->notice->init(); to //$this->notice->init();

This is using version 2.6.9 of the plugin, though the menu-image.php file says it’s version 2.6.4

Hello, I’ve removed all that code, when plugin will be approved by wp.org security team, it will be back again!