Joomla 1.0 spam

This news comes from our secure Joomla 1.0 hosting department. Recently some of our Joomla 1.0 sites became sources of spam. Apparently somebody (with a narrow range of IP addresses geolocating to Malaysia) has found a security problem in VirtueMart recommendation module which allows them to send emails with POST requests.
The solution was to paste the following code into Apache configuration (or .htaccess):
# vm spam patch
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*(page=shop\.recommend).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L]


If you're fed up dealing with lack of security in old Joomla versions, give us a shot. We run Joomla on latest Apache, PHP and MySQL versions, keep a month worth of backups and have several security measures.