It is shocking but one of the easiest ways for hackers and defacers to get hold of your site and mess it up, is simply to do a Google search to see if any vulnerable component strings come up.

You might wonder what exactly an attack on a Joomla website looks like.

How will you recognize one when you see it?

Firstly you should have access to your Raw Log Files

One of the ways to protect your Joomla! site from attacks is by using the latest .htaccess file supplied with the Joomla! installation from Joomla v 1.0.12 onwards.

This .htaccess file contains a section at the end that protects you agains most of the major attacks that are normally launched against a Joomla! site.

Security on a website is very much like insurance policies or burglar alarms in the real world. You know it is 'good thing' and you are supposed to have it, but inevitably you wait until the worst (or almost the worst) has happened to you before you do anything about it.

Joomla!, while we love it to bits and use it on all our sites, unfortunately has become the target of hackers and other undesirable elements on the Internet. Probably because it is so popular and widely used. Some hosting companies now even refuse to let you install Joomla! on their servers since there are so many exploits available for it.

The funny thing is that Joomla! as such is not really more insecure than any other popular CMS or PHP script out there. I think the biggest problem is that since there are so many third party components available for it, and some of these have not been developed with security in mind, that there are now loopholes left wide open by these insecure add-ons.

The advantage of the attacks on these insecure components is that they are then picked up and fixed pretty quickly.

If you run a Joomla! site you HAVE to be aware of security issues since you just cannot think that 'it will never happen to you'. You can believe us... it will.

Better that you follow some of the simple security measures that we will be covering shortly than to wake up one day and see that your site now proudly proclaims to the world that YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED....