I need to develop a very simple database (probably no more than 4-5 tables, with up to 50 records per table) for my company, with the following requirements:
The database itself (most likely an Access file) must be stored on a server and accessed through http://www.something.com/my_db.mdb
Users from 6 different countries (with generally low Internet bandwidth) must be able to access this database and to view / edit it through a few masks, as well as produce automatic reports / extracts
The whole solution must be as robust and as low-tech as possible, to reduce maintenance issues (ideally, no development at all)
I cannot pay an Access license for each user, and using OpenOffie or LibreOffice is not an option (because I cannot go and install it on the computers of all the users)
My first (and naive?) idea was to:
1) Create the mdb file containing only the data and store it on a webserver
2) Create the edition masks and the automatic reports in another file that would define the online file as data source
3) Deploy the file containing the edition masks to the computers of all users
4) The users only have to open their local file to edit the distant DB through ther edition masks
Is my approach somehow realistic? Do you see another approach that would make more sense? Can I implement my solution with 1 single Access license?
Thanks a lot in advance for your inputs and insights!
If you provide just the mdb file as file source, accessible via HTTP, the users won't be able to connect to the database, because in a HTTP GET file download they just get the .mdb file downloaded to their local computer. When they edit something within the database (e.g. add a record), it will be done just locally on their local copy of the file.
If you want to use a access database, the simplest approach I have is that you implement a very small web application (e.g. ASP.NET) which connects to the .mdb file (and the .mdb file then can be in a private directory on the server). Your web application then is deployed to Internet Information Server (Microsoft IIS as a webserver).
You can provide data forms as web application, which you implement using ASP.NET, or develop separate clients which access web services you develop with .NET.
You could try cloud based solutions like; Google Firebase
For a requirement of this type; one should not use Access tables which are static because Access is a front end database but instead use a back end database such as SQL Server Express. SSE is free and one is better positioned to provide real web based features if needed in the long run.
Further I would say, in terms of cost/management - one should really consider using one of the online db services such as soho, knack, airtable, etc. One of these could well be faster and less expensive than creating a web app from scratch for such a small requirement.
A client's Joomla 3.6.5 website was hacked. After running a virus scan and malware scan on the entire directory, nothing came up. When I searched for the malicious URLs, they appear in the database, but nowhere in the code of the website files. I'm not sure how to find the hack, or how to clean out the malicious URLs.
(11216,'http://xxxx.com/cache/j.js',NULL,'http://xxxx.com/philosophy-of-life-essay.html','',3,0,'2017-04-14 10:50:38','0000-00-00 00:00:00',301),
(11217,'http://xxxx.com/cache/jq.js',NULL,'http://xxxx.com/philosophy-of-life-essay.html','',3,0,'2017-04-14 10:50:38','0000-00-00 00:00:00',301),
(11218,'http://xxxx.com/cache/layout.css',NULL,'http://xxxx.com/philosophy-of-life-essay.html','',1,0,'2017-04-14 10:50:57','0000-00-00 00:00:00',301),
(11219,'http://xxxx.com/cache/ssc.css',NULL,'http://xxxx.com/philosophy-of-life-essay.html','',1,0,'2017-04-14 10:52:09','0000-00-00 00:00:00',301),
(11220,'http://xxxx.com/cache/jq.css',NULL,'http://xxxx.com/philosophy-of-life-essay.html','',1,0,'2017-04-14 10:52:09','0000-00-00 00:00:00',301)
Since the malicious URLs are in the database, was the database hacked? How do I remove the malicious URLs and how do I fix the hack? I know I have to change the passwords, but I'm stumped with how to unhack this site. I'm not sure how to clean out a hacked database. Any tips? Thanks!
Q: Since the malicious URLs are in the database, was the database hacked?
A: Not possible to tell with the information provided.
https://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checklist/You_have_been_hacked_or_defaced
The term "hacked" is very broad. Have credentials been fraudulently obtained? Was the website defaced? Was valid data stolen from the database? Has valid data has been removed or changed? Has new fraudulent data been added?
There are several ways any of those could have happened. One possibility is that database modifications were made through normal operation of the website, by a malicious actor who obtained credentials (login and password) to perform those operations.
Or, a malicious actor could have exploited a vulnerability in the website code. Given the predominance of XSS and SQL Injection vulnerabilities, and the relative ease of exploiting those, this is the most likely scenario. (A lot of website "plugins" are known to be vulnerable.)
Or, some other program connected to the database and performed database operations.
Q: How do I remove the malicious URLs?
A first step would be to restore a copy of the database from a known good backup.
And with a saved copy of the suspect database, we could do a comparison, to help identify data that has been removed, changed or added. (What makes a URL "malicious"? How are you defining that? All we see in the question is what appears to be some rows from a database table. How are these rows more "malicious" than other rows?)
Q: How do I fix the hack? I know I have to change the passwords ...
If an unauthorized actor has obtained login credentials, then yes, you need to change the passwords. And figure out how they obtained the credentials, and take steps to prevent that from happening again.
And close up the vulnerabilities, to prevent that from happening again.
Q: I'm stumped with how to unhack this site. I'm not sure how to clean out a hacked database. Any tips?
Restore the database from a known good backup.
And again, mitigate the vulnerabilities to prevent (or make it less likely) that this will happen again. Cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection are always in the OWASP Top 10.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project#tab=OWASP_Top_10_for_2013
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SQL_Injection
What you are experiencing is a database hack, which is the worst kind of Joomla hacks.
Reverting to a backup may be a good solution if you are running a semi-static website, however, if your website has new content every day (or had new content since the hack), then you can't revert to a backup without losing data. In this case, you will need to use MySQL's REPLACE function to replace the hacked strings with an empty value.
Once you fix the database hack, you will need to run an internal scan on your website to ensure to find if there are hacked/backdoor files anywhere. Once that is done, you will need to uninstall all the unused extensions, and you will need to uninstall all the extensions that are on Joomla's VEL list. Any extension that you have must be updated to the latest version.
Once you are done with the above, then you will need to do the following:
Change all the passwords of the website: including Joomla passwords, FTP/sFTP, database passwords (avoid using FTP if you can), cPanel passwords, etc...
Restrict Apache's access of PHP files to the 'index.php' file (that can be done in the htaccess file).
Move the website to a VPS or a dedicated server if you are on a share hosting.
This seems to be a pretty bad one! A few tips:
Be sure to check Google blacklisting status & also do a 'fetch as google' to check if there's malware showing up in search results.
It is recommended to find all the external calls from the website to other domains (usually hackers point credit card details to their own domains or emails).
A diff command would go a long way:
$ mkdir joomla-3.6.4
$ cd joomla-3.6.4
$wget https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.6.4/Joomla_3.6.4-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf Joomla_3.6.4-Stable-Full_Package.tar.gz
$ diff -r joomla-3.6.4 ./public_html
There are more steps which can be checked from this URL: https://www.getastra.com/blog/cms/joomla-security/joomla-admin-security/
I wanted to create a website that would be like a dropbox of sort, which just has files that me and my organization can access. I wanted to password protect the website, just a simple username and password. I have my own domain. I have been looking all over the web to find how to do this(I am a beginner) and found that using httaccess and htpasswd would be used to secure a website similar to what is shown here: http://www.htaccesstools.com/articles/password-protection/
But I cannot seem to get it to work. I am using the s3 bucket and putting the httaccess and htpasswd file in the same folder as the index.html file. Do you know how I would get my site to have a simple password protection(thats not seen in the source code or by typing in the html)? I am not sure if I am finding the directory correctly or not to implement this password protection correctly. Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully this makes sense!
Anyone else had this issue?
Amazon AWS alone won't do it. htaccess and htpasswd are also not the right tools for what you want to do.
Get yourself a cheap hosting account with a company like hostgator or godaddy or namecheap or any other that will host your web page and give you PHP and MySQL.
You cannot accomplish what you want just using javascript/jQuery. Those languages run on the browser, but you want to store your files on a server. Therefore, you need the language that controls the server - that is usually PHP. (The other popular solution is ASP, which is by Microsoft and runs on costly and complex Microsoft servers -- PHP is free and runs on (free) Linux and is therefore what ALL of the cheap web hosting companies provide. MySQL is the (free) database that is analogous to Microsoft SQL)
Next, watch a video tutorial on creating a PHP / MySQL login system, such as the ones over at:
phpAcademy (now called codecourse, apparently)
theNewBoston.com
You need to learn more about:
PHP sessions
Ajax
jQuery
MySQL (possibly)
On a basic website, you can stick your files into directories and control who can access those directories by whether or not they are logged in.
You can determine if a visitor is "logged-in" or not by asking for a username/password and setting a session variable. Session variables are just variables that are stored on the server, rather than on a user's own computer (of course, that wouldn't work since every visitor has his own computer and your files are stored on a central server -- so that is where the security (variables) must reside, right?)
Anyway, in a weekend of video watching and trial-and-error you can probably get something cobbled together that will do what you want.
I want to know which ways I can use to distribute an Access Database.
I'm developing an Access database split for distribute to many customers but I want to do something similar to an .exe file.
One file that contains:
Front-end
Database
Pictures
References
Templates
...
And other things.
I want one file that executes some instructions before opening my application, actions like: Create a folder in My Documents and copying files there,
check serial number of hard drive and continue if its authorized or stop it if not authorized, links FE and DB, encrypt database. (I have this coding in vba).
Can you help me?
You need a program that creates an installer (or setup program). Inno Setup is the first that comes to mind.
It even has its own SO tag. :)
Your setup must first check if Access (in a suitable version) is installed, and if not, install the Access Runtime.
Some of our ColdFusion sites are having the words "coupon" inserted into their footer with a link to another site. Is there anything I can do to prevent this? Is there any software I can run to help detect any vulnerabilities? It doesn't seem to be SQL injection as the databases seem fine and nothing unusual is showing up in the logs.
There are several variations of attacks that produce this sort of result (appending a link to some malicious or nefarious site). For example, this one (Script Injection) uses the latency between a file upload and checking to insert executable code on your server.
Other attack vectors include FTP (which is why you should not use it), or other file transfer protocols. In your case the infected machine may not be the server. It could be a client machine with access to the server - a developer who has set up FTP to the server for example.
Let me know if you need formal help - we have a good track record fixing this sort of thing. If you get more clues post them and I'll try to help. I will warn you that if this is a server infectionit is at the root level and is so pervasive your only option is to start with a pristine install and reinstall your code. Bad news I know - sorry :(
We had something similar happen when one of our servers was hit by the hack Charlie Arehart describes here:
http://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2013/1/2/serious_security_threat
Have you had these patches?
Another option that I would recommend is searching your site(s) for any use of the <cffile> tag that isn't expected. I had a customer that somehow got a single file that was a backdoor to their site. It was particularly dangerous because it could upload files to any location on the server as well as execute any SQL command against any datasource on the server. In other words, this single file opened the door to all of the sites and databases that were running on that server.
This backdoor file (which was named vision.cfm) was often used to update footers with links to coupon and spam sites. vision.cfm was only 210 lines of code.
The entire server had to be sanitized after this was discovered.