My forum got hacked

We are very particular about ensuring the software is secure and check security sites almost daily and if any secure hole, no matter how small, is found we generally have a fix out for it with 2 hours of being made aware of the issue.

At the present time we are not aware of any vulnerabilities in the present version and the only way to be sure of how this was done is to look at your website log files.

You have not mentioned what version you upgraded from, it could be that you were running an old version 7 before which did have a number of security vulnerabilities and the hacker may have used this older version to upload a file that gives him/her a back door to your site to change files.

What you should do is:-

1. Make sure that you ONLY have read, write and modify permissions on the 'upload' directory. The rest of your site should have 'read' only permissions, this prevents hackers from defacing your web site.

2. Check that there is not an unsafe file and image upload type in your forums upload settings (things like .asp, .php, .aspx, etc. should not be permitted as upload types). Towards the end of version 7 this was changed so that the admin can only permit 'safe' upload file types when configuring upload settings.

3. Check your entire site for any files that shouldn't be there. The hacker may have placed a file on your site that allows then access to your web sites files.

4. Make sure that you always keep up-to-date and running the latest versions of any software, like Web Wiz Forums, that you have running on your web site.


Edited by WebWiz-Bruce - 16 May 2008 at 12:46pm