What i do need to know is that how encoding specification in html coding helps preventing these attacks.Means i have been reading articles on the same and they say that specifying the character encoding helps prevent XSS since it helps in determining special characters.Now i am n;t getting this.Plz explain how does that happen and how charset encoding specification helps prevent XSS.

This page is being used as an example of XSS vulnerabilities over from sla.ckers.org.

http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54'%22%3E%3Cscript%08%3Ealert(%22xss%22)%3C/script%08%3E/script%3E,666/topic,1584.0/

This URL also discloses an SQL injection vulnerability on this very site.

Aha. "mos_menu"... Mambo/Jooma in use == vulnerable. Sad to see, really.

You're all welcome.

As a Linux System Admin for a managed hosting company, I see many of these vulnerabilities nightly (I'm a late-night shift worker). Sadly, many of these vulnerabilities exist with Mambo/Joomla sites. I usually recommend against using those packages, myself.

Drupal, if one must use a PHP CMS.

Chris,

You asked what I recommend, not what is "recommended". There isn't a page that I based that info off of -- it's from personal experience. I have yet to see a major drupal installation that has been routinely hacked, cracked and used to host child porn, IRC (eggbot anyone?), phishing scams, etc., or provide a way to test privilege escalation attacks after gaining shell access as the Apache system account user. As for Mambo/Joomla, I see these literally every night I am at work. Many times it is the same sites again and again.

A number of sysadmins I know from work or from other associations use Drupal. That's how I learned of it, myself.

Perhaps I should put up a page. But then it would be drowned out by pages with expertise like "Why chmod 777 is NOT a security risk". Ya know?

Yeah, I don't buy the Microsoft-ish argument about "popularity==vulnerability". Anyway, Drupal may or may not be popular. Don't know.


mos_* refer to major [platform-]components of Mambo/Joomla, I believe, and not [add-on] components. The best resource for finding the security vulnerabilities seems to be SecurityFocus and Milw0rm, and not those two packages. They seem more focused on promotion than information (last I looked).

For fun and profit:

http://www.milw0rm.com/search.php?dong=joomla&Submit=Submit

http://www.milw0rm.com/search.php?dong=mambo&Submit=Submit

http://www.milw0rm.com/search.php?dong=drupal&Submit=Submit