Secure Joomla 3 and Protect it Against Hacker Attack
Joomla is an open source application which is subjected to all sort of hacking attacks. It is important to take all possible measures to protect your Joomla site and to improve its security too.
Securing a Joomla website is a challenging task. That is why companies are doing lot of work to make it safe, such as – Layers of Server-side Security Filters, Automatic Joomla Updates Available, jHackGuard Added to New Installation Automatically, Immediate Response to Zero-day Mass Attacks and many more.
1. Keep Joomla and its extensions up-to-date
The most important part of securing your Joomla website is to keep it updated to the latest version. Mostly in all version releases, there is a facility of fixing security issues. To keep your Joomla extensions up-to-date it is equally important to make your website secure. However, there are many more attacks that utilize security issues in extensions rather than in the actual Joomla 3 core files. When you host with SiteGround, you can simply enable the Joomla Auto-Update feature. This helps you to make sure that your Joomla application is always up-to-date!
2. Use Strong Login Details
Firstly, you need to avoid the use of default user-name, such as – admin or administrator. Secondly, it is important that you should have a strong password for your website, as many attackers try to brute-force your login details. Means they use a list of commonly used passwords to guess yours. To become secure from these kinds of attacks, there are few tips they are: Don't use common words for passwords like – God, love, pass, admin, etc. Avoid personal information in passwords such as – your personal or your family name. Avoid password generators as password generators use algorithms to generate the passwords. Moreover, this can be compromised by an attacker. Use special characters ( *!@#)$ ), capital letters and numbers in your password.
3. Use Proper File Permissions & Ownership
Another important part of secured Joomla 3 website is to set the right permissions for your Joomla files and folders. For this it is recommended to follow the following suggestions: Set the permissions on your Joomla files to 644, Set the permissions for your Joomla folders to 755, Set the permissions for your configuration.php file to 444, Never use 777(full access) permissions!
4. Use Joomla Security Extensions
The use of security extensions is also an easy way to improve your Joomla website security. There are few security extensions which are available at a free for download by anyone, such as – jHackGuard. Some of the most popular Joomla security extensions are: jHackGuard, Akeeba Admin Tools, jomDefender, jSecure and many more.
5. Often Backup your Joomla Site
It is very important to keep backup on your Joomla 3 site as often as possible. Moreover, you should always keep a backup copy of your Joomla files and database on your local computer. It protects & secures you in case something happens.
6. Protect Your Administrative Page
You can improve the security of your Joomla website by restricting the access to your admin area. Firstly, you can protect the administrator folder by your password of your site. For this purpose, you need to follow the instructions of the tutorial. Once you protect your/administrator folder after that, you need an additional password in order to see the standard administrator login form.
