e-War and me

This site is hosted in the US and uses the Joomla! CMS for content management. I chose Joomla because its one of the most easy to learn and had enough documentation for me to customize it the way I wanted. There are also enough free templates, so a template for this site was found.  Unfortunately, Joomla being so widespread is also vulnerable to attacks, with security releases sent every time vulnerability is fixed.

With the ongoing war in the Gaza strip, my site became under attack as many other sites (see report in Slashdot). If normally, the readers came mostly from Israel and a bit from abroad, now I have a lot of attackers looking at the site from other places, not so benevolent.

The net result is a defacing of the site due to XSS vulnerability in Joomla, requiring a complete reinstall and configuration. The positive outcome is a re-upload of all the posts and a bit of clean up of the installed modules.

I believe this is just a face of the cultural clash between the different religions, and a bit of people just enjoying being destructive. At the end, it will have null effect on the war and the public opinion. For me, I’m just another casualty of the e-War.