PHPShield feature now will block additional stream wrappers. Following our vulnearibility report to Joomla! (fixed in 3.8.12) we are providing a feature which brings the same protection to earlier versions of Joomla!.
Remove the IP workarounds "recommended setting" notice due to high rate of false detections. When IP workarounds was already enabled (or an equivalent workaround was already in place by third party code) the automatically detected recommendation was wrong. Moreover, when the third party service detected your IPv6 address instead of your IPv4 the detected recommendation was also wrong. There is no good way to work around these issues, hence this feature was removed. We still do detect if all security exceptions come from the same IP address and recommend you to enabled IP workarounds in that case (and only then).
Bug fixes. We have addressed some known issues with our software. Please consult the CHANGELOG.
We only support Joomla! 3.6 or later, including 3.7 and 3.8. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of Joomla! for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites.
Joomla! 4 is currently in active development, with things changing rapidly every week. As a result we are waiting for the first beta release to continue compatibility work with Joomla! 4. We expect to have a working Joomla! 4 version of our software not long after Joomla! releases a stable version 4.
Support for PHP 5.3 has been discontinued. PHP 5.3 has been end of life since August 2014 and widely considered a security risk, unfit for production sites. Our software requries PHP 5.4 or later and is compatible with PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2. We strongly recommend using PHP 7.2. It's more secure and much faster than previous versions.
We'd like to remind you that Joomla! 3.4 does NOT support PHP 7. PHP 7 is only supported by Joomla! 3.5.0 and later versions.
HEADS UP! The next version family, Admin Tools 5.2, will no longer support PHP 5.4 and 5.5.
Disclaimer: this is not a legal advisory. Please consult your lawyer if you are unsure.
On May 25th, 2018 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. We have been asked about how Admin Tools complies with it a few times. The following is our understanding of it but it does not constitute legal advice of any kind.
While storing IP information may be considered personally identifiable information, the GDPR makes an exception for IP information stored in the context of security. As such the Admin Tools' security exceptions log and related IP whitelist, IP blacklist, automatic IP blocks and automatic IP blocks history is outside the scope of personal data protection.
Text log files may, however, contain privileged information as they capture the entirety of the request sent by the user to your site. We therefore recommend that you DISABLE the "Keep a debug log file" option in the Configure WAF page. Please note that if your logs directory is under your web root and you have not used Admin Tools' features, such as the .htaccess Maker, to secure these directories all your logs may be publicly accessible. We recommend that you always make your logs and temporary directories inaccessible to the web for security reasons.
Furthermore, the GDPR calls for data minimization. To comply with this requirement we urge you to set the "Maximum security exceptions log entries" option to a non-zero value in the System - Admin Tools plugin. Typically, a value of 1000 to 10000 provides a good balance between data minimization and security.
The Project Honeypot and "Warn about use of well-known passwords" features do transmit information to third parties. However, this information is anonymous and should, therefore, fall outside the scope of the GDPR.
Finally, it is possible that in the past you may have enabled the feature to log failed login passwords. This might be a security concern or a violation of the GDPR. We have now removed that feature but you may still have information stored in your database. We recommend that you go to the Security Exceptions Log page, filter by reason "Login failure" and delete all records presented to you.