We were contacted by a company who have several dedicated servers using the Plesk interface provided by Parallels to manage the user interface (a common alternative to CPanel).  Their server had been taken down as it had been compromised via a recently released, critical vulnerability with Parallels Plesk affecting versions 7.6.1 – 10.3.1.

We are often approached, as are many Joomla! developers, by those unfortunate enough to have their websites exploited for one reason or another, asking us to fix the immediate problem and also secure their site against future attacks.  Needless to say this can be quite costly, not ownly in our fees but also in terms of business downtime and potential loss of clients visiting your sites, and loss of confidence (particularly with Ecommerce sites).  Here are some basic tips to help you secure your site and prevent this happening in the first place.

Are you sick of receiving spam submissions on your Joomla! website forms?  Do you have spam bots sign up for accounts and post on your forums?  There are several options available to you nowadays to work against these pesky spammers!

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS AN UPDATE AVAILABLE HERE

The number of people I see posting on forums asking for support on components who are running versions of Joomla! sometimes 4 or more versions out of date is really quite alarming - when I point out to them the error of their ways, often the first question is "Well how do I upgrade to the latest version?".  Hopefully this article should help clarify the process involved with installing the latest patches for Joomla! and help you stay up to date!

Joomla! docs has a full walk-through of this process, which is where most of the information in this article is from.