What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 : This foundational chapter gets the reader ready by reviewing terminology, understanding hosting companies, and how to select them. It also deals with learning to architect Joomla! correctly at first, including where to download Joomla! from, its important settings, permissions and trip-ups, and lastly setting up metrics for security.

Chapter 2 : Once you have your site planned, setting up a test and development environment allows you to make sure each extension will work with the others as planned. This chapter gives the reader a methodology to effectively set up and use a test/dev environment, with a review of a great tool, Lighthouse, for software development project management.

Chapter 3 : There are a few key tools every Joomla! administrator should have in his or her security arsenal. This chapter covers the tools used to protect your site.

Chapter 4 : What is a vulnerability? It is anything that can be used against you to harm your site. This chapter introduces some common vulnerabilities and how they work.

Chapter 5 : Specific attacks such as SQL Injections are discussed here with live examples of code used to attack sites, kiddie scripts, and other more advanced attacks.

Chapter 6 : Do you ever wonder what tools the bad guys use? This chapter covers some of the commonly available tools, and how they are used against you.

Chapter 7 : This chapter details out the two important safeguards to your infrastructure. It offers a detailed view with code samples of each of these critical files.

Chapter 8 : Without a doubt, log files are the first and the best indication of a coming attack. Yet many administrators do not know how to interpret these critical files, or worse yet, ignore them. This chapter will teach the reader how to read log files and take care of them for forensic purposes.

Chapter 9 : SSL is the guardian of e-commerce on the Internet. In this chapter, you will learn how SSL works, where to obtain a certificate, and how to implement it in your Joomla! site.

Chapter 10 : Even the best laid plans go astray. If a site is actually hit, you have an incident to handle. This chapter will educate you on some best practices for handling the incident in an effective manner.

Appendix : Looking for that one bit of information? This chapter is a concise reference to highly important items of security information that will be important to your daily efforts in protecting your site.