Monthly Archives: November 2015

Script Security Updates

As the holiday shopping season has begun it is more important than ever for businesses to make sure their websites are secured against attackers. Staying on top of script updates (plugins and themes included) is one of the easiest and most vital parts of securing your website. We wanted to take a moment to cover a couple of serious updates that should receive special attention this holiday season.

A Joomla update (3.4.5) was released last month to address a critical remote and unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability that is present in all 3.2+ versions. The severity of this cannot be stressed enough as it can allow attackers complete access to your account. We’ve had mod_security rules in place to block exploitation of this vulnerability since the day it was announced. To the best of our knowledge attackers have been unable to circumvent these rules but it is in your best interest to apply this update immediately if you have not done so already. If for some reason you’ve manually disabled mod_security on your website it remains fully exposed to this vulnerability if it hasn’t been patched and has likely already been compromised in some manner. For this reason we never recommend disabling mod_security. Further details concerning this update can be found here.

Last week a vulnerability in Zen Cart was also announced and has subsequently been patched. This is an arbitrary file inclusion vulnerability that again could allow attackers complete access to your account. Details and patches are available directly from Zen Cart here. Please note that public disclosure of this vulnerability is scheduled for December 16th but since a patch has already been released it wouldn’t take much for attackers to figure out how to exploit the vulnerability, if they haven’t already. All Zen Cart users should patch their instances immediately.

As always, we will continue to stay on top of these critical vulnerabilities and address them as possible or necessary. If you have any questions please feel free to submit a ticket via our client portal and we’ll gladly assist in any way that we can.