The last month at work has seen a few attacks on web sites running the popular Zen-Cart e-commerce software.

In all instances it has taken place due to the administrators of the sites not changing the admin login to something other than admin, or the version that is running their site a few versions behind the current release which is 1.3.8.

Zen Cart have released an important security patch for the most recent exploit against their software that can be found here.

Zen Cart as with all CMS and blog software that can be installed as a web site need to be regularly updated as version patches and or security patches are released.  As a WordPress user we we are spoiled as the software tells us when a new version has been released and the upgrade can be implemented from within the Admin interface itself.  Zen Cart users are not so fortunate and any upgrade process can be a long and daunting process for non technical users.

If your site is built on any of the software below, then you need to ensure that you are running the latest revision of the software as soon as possible after it’s release:

• Zen Cart
• OSCommerce
• Mambo
• Joomla
• WordPress

This is something that you should check with your host prior to signing up…

These are probably the most commonly targeted installations and hackers are onto them as soon as possible exploiting any sites that they can find which have not been patched, although fixable; it is not always an easy process to do so.  It can also be a costly one if you do not regularly make a backup of both your website files and regularly take an SQL dump of the database that drives it; some hosts will charge you in excess of AU$80 to AU$200 +GST to do a restore of your web site, making that cheap hosting at $5.00 per month not so attractive any longer.  This is something that you should check with your host prior to signing up to verify that backup and a restore functionality is included in your hosting package.

In addition to the upgrading of your base site platform; it should be remembered that if you have any plug-in’s or modules that these also need to be kept up to date and calendaring modules are usually the most susceptible to hacking issues.  Again, WordPress has an inbuilt updater for all your plug-ins making the process painless one.

Can you honestly say right now, what version of your website software that you are running?  If not you should be able to or at the very least; you should be able to look at a file on your computer or in a folder somewhere that will tell you.  If you can’t do this, then you need to find out and if necessary; upgrade the software to the latest available version and also make sure that any modules, plug-in’s and components are also up to date.

Hopefully, this will have made you think and avoided a possible hack on your site by making you check if nothing else.