Protect your Joomla site from security vulnerabilities

If you own a website built on a well-known CMS such as WordPress or Joomla, you should be aware that security vulnerabilities can cause serious damage to your work.
This is an especially important consideration in the case of an e-commerce site.

Where do these security vulnerabilities come from?

Joomla is an open source CMS solution — meaning it is freely accessible.
One of the strengths of open source is that it allows anyone to modify the code to suit their needs. As a result, an ecosystem has grown up around Joomla, with developers creating extensions that add functionality to the CMS — for example, a map, a form, a theme…
Vulnerabilities can therefore stem from quality issues in the development of one of these tools. This is why choosing a free extension is not necessarily the right decision in the medium term.
On top of this, web standards evolve (mobile adaptation, faster/more efficient languages, higher security levels, encryption…). These changes require updates to the core of the CMS, which are generally carried out by a highly qualified volunteer team of developers (this corresponds to the version number of the CMS you can see: for example, 3.5.2 is a minor update of version 3.5.0, which was itself a major update of version 2.5).
These updates are important for the community because they allow the CMS to incorporate the latest web standards and recommendations. They can represent major changes and require a profound reorganisation of the CMS structure.
As a result, all the extensions that enrich a site must adapt to remain compatible with the latest versions. This requires regular work from the developers who created them. This is why a free extension often carries the risk of no longer being maintained in the medium or long term by its creator.
On top of these developments, one must also account for hackers' ability to find vulnerabilities, much as burglars find ways to bypass a bank's security systems. The community grows stronger through these empirical developments, and updates also block identified vulnerabilities reported by contributors.

What are the risks posed by these vulnerabilities?

When a vulnerability is discovered by a cybercriminal, it can allow them to enter the affected sites and take control of them.
In simplified terms, a cybercriminal who spots a vulnerability will use a bot or script to scan sites and exploit that flaw, targeting all sites that use the tool in which the vulnerability was identified.
As Joomla is a particularly comprehensive and widely used solution, hackers know that finding a vulnerability in it will allow them to affect a significant number of sites — making it a prime target.

How to protect against Joomla security vulnerabilities?

The platform performs regular updates. Among other things, these are designed to patch this type of weakness.
Maintaining your site and keeping it regularly updated is therefore the best way to protect yourself against risks. Updates are specifically designed, among other purposes, to fix identified vulnerabilities.
Joomla maintains particularly rigorous monitoring of security vulnerabilities and coding errors. As a result, any vulnerability is quickly identified and addressed. Flaws are rectified all the more rapidly when they are serious or carry significant risks.

A few notable examples of vulnerabilities

For example, in late 2016, two dangerous vulnerabilities were exposed in Joomla.
The first, CVE-2010-8870, represents a verification flaw. Its direct consequence is the ability to create one or more user accounts on any Joomla-managed site, even those where the administrator has disabled the registration process. An open door on any affected site.
The second vulnerability, CVE-2016-8869, can become problematic when used in conjunction with the first. Indeed, it allows the privileges of a user account to be escalated, enabling actions that would normally be impossible at that level.
Joomla's update was swift in addressing these two significant vulnerabilities. The resulting patch secures sites that apply it and protects them from both flaws.

A maintenance contract to protect your Joomla site?

Http5000, as a website creator, knows how to keep your site up to date and therefore regularly patched against identified vulnerabilities.
We offer maintenance contracts to keep your site active on the server and protect it against potential attacks and spam. For guaranteed web security and optimal maintenance, it is a straightforward solution that will save you from having to manage the technical side of these corrective updates yourself.