On Friday 9th Sept 2010, I did a check in Google to see how many of opensourcevarsity pages were indexed. In a Google search box I typed in: site:opensourcevarsity.com.
To my complete dismay, multiple pages were displayed in Google, starting with the opensourcevarsity index page that had the Page Title and Description hijacked.
The Page Title and Description carried information about pharmacies in Australia and NewZealand that were selling Viagra and Cailis and other such drugs. Sheesh !!!!!.
Our website that delivers really good tutorials on various Open Source Tools and Technologies now looked the world’s best website for people with erectile dysfunction issues.
We took Opensourcevarsity offline for 4 days while we battled this issue.
The details of what we did to:
- Clean up opensourcevarsity
- Harden the website to ( hopefully )
- Try and prevent this from happening again are written in a Hub page I wrote
Do take a look.
The Joomla CMS core is pretty secure right out of the box. Regretfully, there are a host of things that can make a Joomla website insecure.
Most Joomla CMS users seem a just a little afraid to harden their Joomla websites, often not really knowing what exactly to do.
If you want to know what you should do to help make sure that your Joomla website is secure then please take a look at the opensourcevarsity Joomla security tutorials.
These tutorials, guide you step by step how to make your Joomla website as secure as humanly possible
Regretfully, the Joomla framework sometimes get a bad reputation for security, not because the core framework is specifically insecure but due to the fact that there are a ton of factors external to the Joomla framework that make Joomla driven websites insecure.
If there is a weak spot in the security of any aspect of a Joomla website, the site can be compromised, hacked into or hijacked.
Most people just turn a blind eye when hearing the words “Joomla” and “security” spoken in the same sentence. Believe me, You don’t have to!
Securing your Joomla driven site is rather easy, if you know what, where, and how the Joomla website must be hardened.
I’ve written two Hubs on hardening a Joomla website, there are step-by-step details provided that you can follow. If you have questions do feel free to ask. I’ll do my best to answer. Take a look at Securing a Joomla website part I
