Hackers have long been known for their tendency to identify weaknesses in programs, but in today’s world, there are a number of programs that people put to use which are incredibly easy to keep safe. CMS or Content Management Systems are standard on the web today, being the software that runs blogs from all over the world. Two common examples of this are Joomla and WordPress, loved by users globally for their ease of use and high number of features. While these blogs are certainly a good way to get content out to the public, they do need to be updated with patches just as soon as those patches are made available because hackers do look for ways to exploit these programs and attack the web application security. While users might be aware that patching is needed, all too often it is not kept up with and when that happens, big problems can arise. SySmox experienced such a problem when a number of users who had not kept with the patching for their Joomla and WordPress installations unwittingly played a role in helping hackers attack the ISP’s shared hosting servers. The hackers were able to run scripts that caused problems and forced the tech support team to go to battle against the scripts to regain control over the servers by exploiting vulnerabilities in the kernel.

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