NOTE: This post is not talking about performing illegal acts.
Hey folks. I was trying to decide whether I should post this or not, but eventually decided to.
My main niche has been literally flooded with competition over the past 2 years with turnkey web sites which are actually pretty feature-rich and compete nicely with my own custom-coded solutions.
For one turnkey PHP product, I currently know of around 60 of these sites which are in the Alexa top 100,000 that use it, so this could have a pretty big impact if somebody else reproduced it.
I obtained a much older version of this code from an old colleague and decided to dig a little bit deeper into the PHP code and see exactly what was behind this cool setup. The version I have is from 2008, while most of the sites I know are running versions from 2011-2012. The newest versions are ioncube encoded.
Anyhoo, digging deep into the code of the 2008 version and what do you know, I have found 16 potential ways to authenticate as the site administrator and change anything I want within the site's infrastructure; this includes links, text, changing passwords, 301 redirects and anything else really. I have confirmed this with the latest version of this CMS which appears to be simply a reskinned version of the older stuff *sigh*. Note: I have no made any attempts to unlawfully access any networks.
Now, my dilemma is that a lot of these sites use techniques for gaining their popularity that I would not approve of, mainly spam.
Do I
A weird thread for someone who isn't that active on the forums.. but it was the best place I could think of to post something like this
Thoughts?
Hey folks. I was trying to decide whether I should post this or not, but eventually decided to.
My main niche has been literally flooded with competition over the past 2 years with turnkey web sites which are actually pretty feature-rich and compete nicely with my own custom-coded solutions.
For one turnkey PHP product, I currently know of around 60 of these sites which are in the Alexa top 100,000 that use it, so this could have a pretty big impact if somebody else reproduced it.
I obtained a much older version of this code from an old colleague and decided to dig a little bit deeper into the PHP code and see exactly what was behind this cool setup. The version I have is from 2008, while most of the sites I know are running versions from 2011-2012. The newest versions are ioncube encoded.
Anyhoo, digging deep into the code of the 2008 version and what do you know, I have found 16 potential ways to authenticate as the site administrator and change anything I want within the site's infrastructure; this includes links, text, changing passwords, 301 redirects and anything else really. I have confirmed this with the latest version of this CMS which appears to be simply a reskinned version of the older stuff *sigh*. Note: I have no made any attempts to unlawfully access any networks.
Now, my dilemma is that a lot of these sites use techniques for gaining their popularity that I would not approve of, mainly spam.
Do I
- Contact the developer of this software (which is actually very expensive),
- Contact the site owners, or
- Do nothing and hope that someone else figures this out and has these (some of which are spammy) sites wiped out?
A weird thread for someone who isn't that active on the forums.. but it was the best place I could think of to post something like this
Thoughts?
