Sometimes you need to block a certain IP address, a group of addresses or certain hosts from accessing your Joomla website. Reasons may include:

• It's a hacking attempt coming from that IP
• Someone is scraping content from your website
• A brute-force attack (in most cases a DoS - Denial of Service - attack is originated from that IP (there are too many requests coming from a particular IP
• Someone continuously spamming your website
• Some content from your site (images, media files) are hotlinked from your website.

The solution is simple, but is advised to apply first other tools to stop these bad guys - overuse of this tip can slow down your site considerably, use it ony if you don't have anything else - or you are in hurry to stop an ongoing attack.

One of often overlooked security (and not only) resource for any Joomla site is under your fingertips! With each Joomla install (even from the old Mambo days) you have a file named htaccess.txt in your site's root directory. In most cases is never touched, and left as is - most weekend webmasters don't even know what is for. A few are using it to help Joomla or the specialized SEF URL builders to make those pretty SEF URL's for their site. And that's pretty easy - in most cases it's enough to rename it to .htaccess, and you are set. But there is much more power hidden there...

You may think that updating your Joomla site to the latest version is not something worth doing every time a new version is released. The site works just fine, and you are not interested in the eventual new additions. You're wrong! There's always a major reason for update to the latest version of Joomla: Security!

Most of attacks on the web - and Joomla sites aren't an exception - are made fully or in first phase at least by automated robots. These are using known entrance points as administrator logins to most used software solutions to try they chances to break in. So it's a wise move to change these well known locations. But wait! The need to upgrade compatibility may made this difficult, so, how we can do this without changing a line in Joomla code?

Every hacker in this world knows, that by default all Joomla database tables have the "jos_" prefix. Is that well known, than even automated defacing scripts are using this, and there are a lot of "tools" which are capable to automatically probing your site having this presumption built into them.

Joomla has everything you may need. Right? If you take a look to the Joomla Extensions site, you may agree with this. But, as always, there may be cases, when the above statement is wrong. For specific need he simplest approach may be to use for specific purposes a standalone script. You can solve the problem - apparently - by using Joomla's wrapper feature, and use your scripts as they where part of your Joomla site. Almost perfect solution you may think... but your scripts are directly accessible by their physical URL, not only through the Joomla interface. What you can do about?

A lot. And surprisingly easily.