Support

 Hi, I raised this before #26870 but didn't quite understand the answer and got caught up with other things. Thanks to your other support, some of those other things got fixed so now I can go back to this issue. In brief

emails from Admin Tools about template= in URL. In checking the Security Exceptions Log, I find a number of similar entries:

http://mysite.com/index.php/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&template=jsn_boot_ml&link=fe1bdb38abdf83786cd39e14a96f8c5037068e0d

The answer to the earlier ticket references use of the "mailto" link. So I check and there is no "mailto" link on any page on the site.
I read a little more and I think I see that this security exception can also be triggered by various search engine bots; that there is no security downside to setting Allow site templates and, if I ever do want to allow the user to use "mailto", this would have to be done in any case.
So there is no deeper underlying cause I should investigate before just turning "Allow site templates" on?
Thanks, Mike

Mike,

I'm not sure that a search bot would be hitting a URL that doesn't exist on your site. That sounds like it would be more in the realm of a malicious bot. They are programmed to look for known vulnerabilities and just blindly go from one IP address to another trying to find a hole. That's why you see Wordpress vulnerabilities tried against your Joomla! site. They don't really care what's there.

Even if you allowed site templates, I can't see how it could do much damage. It could sit there and mail out copies of the article over and over. That would burn up bandwidth and other resources and could be used to annoy the recipient, sort of a mini DoS attack. I can't imagine it would be very effective on either end.

I don't see any danger in enabling the feature, but if you're not using it, there's no reason to accommodate a random bot either.

Thanks Dale. Please don't think I know this is a bot or something else. I don't, it was just something I read in the docs / tickets here.
I posted the previous ticket because I get these Security warnings occasionally - sometimes 3 or 4 in a day, some days nothing. I don't know whether to take action on these warnings or ignore them (other than my general principle of "if it's a warning, you should do something about it").
And, as far as I have been able to workout from this support site, there are two choices:
1. Do nothing and just ignore the warnings
2. Allow site templates which means this (whatever it is) will keep going on, I just won't get any warnings about it.
Which is best?
Thanks

If you don't have the mailto enabled on your site, I don't think I would enable site templates just to stop the warning. Everything that you see in the Security Exceptions Log has been blocked, so it isn't a threat. Something is calling a URL which doesn't show up on your site. I don't see any legitimate reason for that.

This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.