Daniel Kanchev @dvkanchev

8 Most Popular Joomla! Hacks &

How To Avoid Them

Daniel Kanchev

7+ Years of Joomla! experience 5 Years with SiteGround Love FOSS Addicted to extreme sports

Before we begin …

@dvkanchev

of 100,000 Joomla! sitesSiteGround is the home

We face hundreds if not thousands security attacks per day …

“Why would somebody hack me?”

Hackers don’t really care about your site. All they care is to send some spam.

If anybody tells you your site is unhackable, that guy is a liar!

“Security is a not a product, but a process”

1. Outdated Joomla! Core

…of Joomla! file upload security bug

Quick demo…

More info on the hack

• All versions before 3.1.5 and 2.5.14 are vulnerable

• Can be executed by anybody, no admin rights needed

• The attacker can obtain full access to Joomla! and its surrounding userspace

More info on the hackJoomla!!

http://goo.gl/8YwZIk!!

Sucuri!http://goo.gl/WjLKGm!

!SiteGround!

http://goo.gl/NWkZTz

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE!

Use software to get notified and update Joomla! Core

Admin Tools https://www.akeebabackup.com/products/admin-

tools.html !!!

Watchful.li https://watchful.li/features/

SiteGround offers Joomla! Auto Update

Read security bulletins

!

Joomla! Security News:!http://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaSecurityNews

!

Sucuri:!http://blog.sucuri.net/?s=joomla

2. Extensions

• Your site is up to date

• Your extensions are up to date

• But you still get hacked…

• Wonder why?

Here’s a Scenario:

Extension vulnerabilities

• Sometimes when vulnerability in an extension is found, it takes the extension developers too much time to fix it.

• Therefore it’s always good to use a WAF!

• WAF = Web Application Firewall

Popular WAFs

SiteGround adds more than 200 mod_sec rules every week.

Example mod_sec rule

# 30.Sep.2013 # joomla com_seminar Cross site scripting Vulnerability # http://cxsecurity.com/issue/WLB-2013090184 SecFilterSelective REQUEST_FILENAME "index\.php" "chain,id:00680" SecFilterSelective ARG_option "com_seminar" chain SecFilterSelective ARG_search "onmouseover"

CloudFlare and Incapsula are advanced mod_security alike FREE services

which add a CDN functionality.

More Security Bulletins

Joomla! Extensions Security News:!!

http://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaSecurityVulnerableExtensions

3. Themes

-Nicholas Dionysopoulos

“Templates are software, not just a bunch of graphics. Template developers do release security upgrades all the time. Make sure you install them. I've seen many sites getting hacked because of a dated template with a SQL injection or XSS vulnerability.”

Example

RocketTheme SQL injection in their modules!!

http://www.rockettheme.com/blog/extensions/1300-important-security-vulnerability-fixed

!

WAF is good for themes too!

4. Weak passwords

Let me tell you a story…

On April 9th we got hit by a huge brute force attack towards many Joomla!s

… and we blocked more than 92,000 IPs in total across our network in just

Bots used more than a thousand different IPs per server to scan for

passes…

In 12 hours we blocked more than 15 million login requests

But still, we thought many passwords were guessed

And we were shocked how many passwords we found.

We then tried to brute force our clients ourselves.

Over 40% of our customers used Really Weak passwords.

Username is admin

Let me show you how easy it is to guess a dumb password, say:

“pass123”

So in less than 10 seconds I’ve got your password

Tip: Change your password to a full sentence - it’s easy to remember and hard

to guess like: !

“I love to watch the sunset.”

admin2 is not acceptable too ;) Try with: !

yourname_@dm1n

Tip 2: Change your username!

Tip 3: Additionally secure your administrator login page

• Allow access only from certain IP addresses

• Add Captcha

• Password protect the administrator folder

• Use secret URL parameters

5. Outdated Server Software

http://eindbazen.net/2012/05/php-cgi-advisory-cve-2012-1823/

Old PHP 5.3 running as CGI remote execution exploit

Quick demo…

Make sure your server side software is current at all times.

6. Incorrectly configured server software

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Aug/81

Apache Symlinks bug

public_html/fred.txt —> /home/otheracct/public_html/configuration.php

Add to httpd.conf or .htaccess file: SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

The Problem:

The Solution:

7. Joomla! Permissions

Correct Joomla! Permissions set

• Folders: 755 • Files: 644 • configuration.php: 444

Incorrect Joomla! Permissions set

• All: 777 • Anything more than: 755

It’s a must to have account isolation, when hosted on shared.

8. Malware

Viruses and Trojans steal your login details.

Stay up to date on anti-virus software.

So let’s recap…• Update your Joomla!

• Update your extensions. Read security bulletins ones in a while.

• Update your themes. Don’t forget that!

• Use strong passwords and non default admin usernames.

• Make sure your server side software is current (PHP, Apache, MySQL)

• Make sure your server side software is correctly setup

• Use correct file permissions for Joomla!

• Watch up for that sneaky malware

Questions?

Thank you! !

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