Joomla Security: A Smaller Ecosystem With the Same Obligations

Joomla occupies an awkward middle position. It carries the same responsibilities as any self-hosted CMS, with a smaller community and a smaller extension ecosystem than WordPress or Drupal. That combination does not make it insecure. It does change which risks are most likely to bite.

The stranded-version problem is the main one

Joomla 3.x reached end of life in August 2023. A significant number of Joomla sites did not migrate, because the move to Joomla 4 was not a routine update but a genuine migration with template and extension rework attached, and that cost was easier to defer than to fund.

Those sites are now running unsupported software indefinitely. If you administer a Joomla site and do not know which major version it is on, that is the first thing to check, and if the answer is 3.x, it is the only finding that matters until it is resolved.

This is a recurring pattern rather than a one-off. Joomla's major upgrades have historically been more disruptive than WordPress's, which means each one leaves a tail of sites behind. Budget the migration as part of owning the platform.

Extensions, with fewer eyes on them

Joomla extensions carry the same class of risk as WordPress plugins, with two differences that cut in opposite directions. There are far fewer of them, so the aggregate attack surface across the ecosystem is smaller and mass-exploitation campaigns are less frequent. But each one typically has fewer users, fewer contributors and less scrutiny, so an individual extension is less likely to have been examined closely by anyone.

The Joomla project maintains a Vulnerable Extensions List, which is genuinely useful and underused. Check what you have installed against it rather than assuming that no news is good news, because for a small extension, no news is the expected state either way.

Configuration specifics worth checking

Joomla's administrator login lives at a predictable path and is a standard target for credential attacks. Two-factor authentication is built in and should be mandatory for every administrator account.

Joomla's user group and access level system is powerful and, like Drupal's, easy to configure too permissively. Review which groups can install extensions or edit templates, because both are equivalent to full control of the site.

Finally, check that the site is not still serving files left over from installation or migration. Old backup archives and installation directories left in the web root are a recurring finding on Joomla sites specifically, usually placed there during a migration that was completed under time pressure and never tidied.

What to actually do

Confirm your major version is supported, and if it is not, treat migration as a security task with a date rather than a nice-to-have. Enable 2FA for all administrators. Check installed extensions against the Vulnerable Extensions List and remove anything unmaintained. Keep the site behind a WAF, since a smaller ecosystem does not mean less automated scanning. And keep off-server backups you have actually restored from.

The cross-platform fundamentals apply unchanged: access control, third-party code, and knowing what to do in the first hour.

For how the self-hosted burden compares with managed platforms, see website security by platform.