SCDIT Blog

For the past 7 years we always install some type of Web Access Firewall into the sites we build, and have noticed in recent months more attempts to access the sites. As more websites come online and the skills of hackers also develop the need to protect those sites become increasingly more important. A simple site often stores the credentials of at least one or two users. This will often be a name, email address, and a password.

One of the ones we like to use is “RSFirewall“. They have been great with our Joomla sites and the past couple of years we have used their free version on a number of WordPress sites with no issues. Most attacks come from 3 party plug-ins vulnerability, but brute force is still very common.

Hackers can reverse the encryption to expose the password of user and use this password and email address to potentially use this to get money. Installing a WAF can be easy, and we encourage every site owner to install one. We always make sure a site can be fully recovered before installing any plugins or components by making a complete backup of the files and database. We are always here to help anyone with their websites.

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We feel you should always update, but on this update we had an issue. First if you are going to update make a full back up of the site and download it. We have a bunch of WordPress site so we started to update a few this morning. The first one is using DIVI wouldn’t install the update, but didn’t break the site. The second site a running a Gantry template ran until “updating database” where it sat for 10 minutes. . In the end we got all the sites updated, so stick with it.

The DIVI site wouldn’t install the update the first couple of times. We were ready to do a manual update after we ran a full backup, but ran the 5.9 update from the dashboard once the backup ran. We don’t know exactly fixed it issue, but glad it was updated without breaking anything.

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Short answer…probably not yet. We only say this based on our testing. We used a Joomla 3.10.4 site and downloaded the lastest upgrade package from the Joomla website. We are running a Gantry 5 Template on the site, and a bunch of extensions. None of the extensions are crazy. Mainly Akeeba and No-Number/Regular Labs products. We ran the update and the site was broken.

In the browser title was:

Error: 0 Class 'JRequest' not found

We were hoping it just worked, but we have tried this in past and got roughly the same result. We like using Joomla for the Access Control Levels and the way Joomla handles media such as images over WordPress. Joomla 3.10.x will be around for a few more years; however, we were hoping to go to Joomla 4 for the over all enhancements. Perhaps using a simpler template would work better. For now we would suggest holding off on just upgrading your Joomla 3.X site to 4.

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Using Content Management Systems (CMS) makes building websites so much faster, but left unmaintained the site can hurt more than help. We run firewalls on the sites we build and one of the popular tactics we see in the logs is “File Inclusion”. These files often redirect “Search” users to other sites. This will cause a site’s reputation to be affected.

Running updates is not always easy. For the most part the updates work great, but when they go wrong and they can you have to restore the site. When we have had updates go wrong, so we always start with a full backup. Even if the site is small this first step is so worth it. It is probably the best and fastest way to recover your site.

Maintenance isn’t always updates; moreover, this is great time to look at any comments your site may have gotten. This is the time we look at the firewall and block IPs that are repeat offenders. This is also a good time to verify your Google Analytics is tracking correctly. We also take a peek at the users to make sure we don’t see any bad actors in there as well.

We log into unmaintained customer sites and often see many updates that are needed, and it can be scary. So many possible changes. If you read this article and are unsure about updating your website please contact us and we can help. Better safe than sorry….

Let us know if this helped you in any way.