Joomla! versions before 3.5.0, including the 2.5.x series (likely all the way back to 1.6.0, no regression testing done) are vulnerable to reflective XSS:

Howdy folks...

It's been a long, long time since I've made any sort of updates here. Too long. Years.

A lot has happened in the past few years. Some of you know the whole story, some only bits and pieces, and the majority of you probably think I got hit by a bus or something.

This is a message that's privately public. If there's the slightest chance you're offended by profanity, please don't bother clicking "Read More," as what follows may be too vulgar for your senses. That said, bring on the poetry/freeform rant...

Joomla! 1.6.x/1.7.x/2.5.0-2.5.2 suffers from a privilege escalation vulnerability that allows users to be registered into any group not having 'core.admin' privileges.

There is a serious problem with the way Joomla! handles the "remember me" login cookie. It is possible to decrypt the contents of this cookie and alter the serialized data inside, which could possibly lead to exploitation. Versions 1.5 through 1.7.1 are affected.

Back in February, I reported an issue with TinyMCE to the Joomla! Security Strike Team. Since then, they "fixed" it in 1.6.1, but failed to do so for 1.5.23. Joomla! 1.5.x ships with a script that is supposed to cache gzipped copies of TinyMCE, but not only is this script never used, but it doesn't clean up after itself.

Now that 1.6.1 is officially released, I figured I'd go ahead and publish a few of the "sensitive" bugs I found in 1.6.0.

Joomla! 1.5 and 1.6 rely on the JFilterInput class to sanitize user-supplied html. This class attempts to parse any given string for html code, checks the code against a whitelist of elements and attributes, and strips out any code that is not allowed. However, malformed html code can be used to bypass the filter and inject XSS code into user-supplied input.

After having a couple different people ask me which Joomla! security extension I recommend, and having no real answer, I figured the best way was to simply try each one against various security risks and see which vectors are detected. This test should not be considered conclusive, and is not meant to endorse or defame any particular extension.

I'm happy to announce the availability of JMyLife 1.0.16. This release brings the ability to filter by date ranges and a new Frontend Edit mode.