New web site, why? Featured
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If you have been a user of our original web site and don't attend meetings of the Tarkington Tower Owners Association board meetings then you were not able to hear my explanation, so here goes.
Roughly 4 years ago the board president, Nadine Harris, asked me if I would set up a site. I'm a retired IT professional although I had never operated in the web environment it sounded interesting. Our original idea was to take advantage of web site generators but after researching possibilities it was determined that those were too simplistic and delivered very little flexibility. Addition research identified the fact that what we needed was a "content management system" - a CMS. A CMS is a structural framework that serves as a platform to deliver content. There are several such CMS offerings out there and we chose the one that had the most support and for us that was a CMS called, "joomla!". Supposedly joomla means communicate in some language, but I've never been able to verify that as a fact.
Back when I built our original site, joomla was at release level 1.5. At this point it is at release level 3.2. That didn't seem to present a problem since we rarely changed the site except to add content (articles) and content is release level agnostic. The real problem of behind behind on release levels became apparent last year, our site was hijacked and used as a phishing (pronounce as, fishing) site. A phishing site is a web site that captures a user's information. The way it works is first some black hearted individual injects files into your site effectively creating a new site that exists below the entry point of your site. By the way, you cannot tell what has been done because if you come to the site as you normally would, you'll see no difference.
This black hearted individual then acquires the address book(s) of financial institutions or harvests email addresses from other sources and sends out emails to the unsuspecting. Those emails contain language that informs the recipient that he or she needs to click on the enclosed link (a URL) so that they can correct or update their account information. The link is "cloaked" and appears to be a button that takes that individual to their financial institution's web site. Once there they are asked to enter identifying information such as account number, full name, password plus name and address. Instead of actually being sent to their financial institution they were actually sent to our site, well to the site created under our site.
The information they enter is harvested by the injected logici and sent to a server where it is accumulated then used to empty bank accounts.
So the effect of being behind on release levels is that security holes are identified and exploited. The newer releases of joomla have shored up security logic and joomla is now less vulnerable. We were able to recover from that series of attacks (we actually "hosted" 3 different banks) but the site has not operated as well as it did originally since that attack.
Recently our ISP (internet service provider) told us that our joomla framework is so old that if we have another problems they'll shut us down. As a result, we've upgraded to the current release.
One of the benefits of this current release is the ability to create what is referred to as a, "responsive site". Responsive in this context means that it will operate and operate well on: a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a smart phone. So the site you are now viewing should be usable on any of those devices. As you can tell, we're using a simpler and cleaner look.
I hope you find it useful.
