Joomla! How-To's

Happy New Year - How's your patches?

It's about the middle of January of 2010 and in the news, Google was hacked by unknown's from China and Google is considering a few options, including a complete pull out of China. A large search engine in China (not Google) was defaced by the Iranian cyber thugs, Adobe was appartently targeted in the same attack as Google. And in other news the new BREECH report came out from the ITRC showing that overall while breeches were lower than the year before, the number of exposed records was higher. And as I write this article, this just came across my desk:

"Hackers have stolen the login credentials for more than 8,300 customers of New York's Suffolk County National Bank after breaching its security and accessing a server that hosted its online banking system. "
source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/12/bank_server_breached/

What does this have to do with your Joomla site? Everything. Today I am discussing patching and patch management with you. For the purpose of this article I am going to refer to my personal favorite work on patching from ProjectQuant - Measuring and Optimizing Patch Management: an Open Model. A must read in my opinion.

This post is for all of you Mac fans out there, specifically those using the excellent Coda editor by Panic. I could preach all day long about how using a quality code editor like Coda can both speed up your coding as well as make your coding better.

One brilliant little function of Coda is that it has a built-in code snippet collector called 'Clips'. What's even more brilliant is that Coda gives developers a way to share groups of these clips with each other. I was inspired by our friend Jon from Zuno Studios when he released a few clip groups relating to Joomla 1.5 development a few months ago. His clips are specifically geared towards developers creating extensions, and if you're at that level I highly recommend checking out his handy clips.

Since more of my day-to-day work involves creating templates, I put together a set of clips that I use almost daily for creating Joomla 1.5 templates. Lucky for you Coda users out there, I've packaged them up in a tidy group that you can download.

On 12/17/2008 around 7:00 PM EST , Twitter.com was hacked by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army. The actual attack was a DNS Hijacking (or DNS Poisoning) that resulted in Twitter Users being directed to a page of their choosing. In this example here is what they posted:

This old school defacement actually was conducted by 'hijacking' the sites DNS - how they accomplished this is still unknown, the fact is they did. What exactly is a DNS Poisoning or Hijacking?

One of the most important aspects of extension development is gathering input from the user and manipulating it in a meaningful way. Many times, you will collect data with a form and then store it into a database table. Other times, you will decide how to order or display information to the user based on the query string of the URL. In either instance, you are taking and acting upon input from the user. Obviously, you hope that your users have good intentions in using your extension, but unfortunately, the reality is that not everyone has your best interests in mind. For that reason, you must be careful about the input that you allow into your extension.

A detailed look at the Wireshark protocol analyzer

Greetings, In this article I want to discuss the other powerful tool a systems administrator should know about. It is called Wireshark (from Wireshark.org). Wireshark is in essence a sniffer, in that it can listen in on the packets on the wire and tell you whats what. Officially its called a protocol analyzer which is more true to its mission. In this article I want to share with you a few items of value about Wireshark, and why you should get to know this tool better.

I think that as technical people we get lulled into a dull sense of safety with tools, for example a reliance on a control panel tool that identifies bad guys by their actions and blocks their IP's. This is for sure a good thing, but it is not the only thing. With tools like Wireshark, we can peer into the activity of our server and see what is going on at the packet level. A client some months ago came to JoomlaRescue.com and was having a problem with continually being hacked. We tracked it down to a compromised (vulnerable) FTP software that had allowed them in. However we found they were using FTP through the use of Wireshark.

This is important because if you were unfortunate enough to have a bad guy insert this INTO your network he could eavesdrop on everything you do. However - in this use case, it is being demonstrated as diagnostic tool.

For the purposes of this article I ran Wireshark on MY personal machine only. It was never allowed  outside my network, so in other words, everything you see here came to my machine using normal, everyday browsing techniques.