Compass Designs .net

Its recently surfaced that there is a small hole in the password reset process for Joomla 1.5. Recently for me as this site was hacked late this afternoon and I spent an amusing hour or so tussling with the would be hacker and me in the backend of the site. He was busy deleting articles, I was busy deleting his user.

The j.org team have released a fix already. Its a critical security patch and part of 1.5.6. You should update your site ASAP if you are running Joomla 1.5.

A flaw in the reset token validation mechanism allows for non-validating tokens to be forged. This will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id). Typically, this is an administrator user. Note, that changing the first users username may lessen the impact of this exploit (since the person who changed the password does not know the login associated with the new password). However, the only way to completely rectify the issue is to upgrade to 1.5.6 (or patch the /components/com_user/models/reset.php file).

On a related issue, this has made me think of how I set up Joomla sites in the future. You might want to follow these steps:

1. Install Joomla et al
2. Create a few users
3. Create a new super admin with a user name other than "admin"
4. Delete the original "admin" user created on installation

I claim no security expertise... but taking these steps might slow them down a little!