Due to its cost-effective nature many businesses today prefer to use open source web products. Being open source means that they are either free or cost relatively less than their customized counterpart. Open source web products wins not only in price but are also preferred because of the wide range of plug-ins and extensions available that can be easily integrated with the website to provide the visitors more features and functionalities that would otherwise be expensive.
Developers too prefer to work mostly with open source systems. The ease of installation, customization and modifications makes it a developers' preference over a customized solution where they have to code from scratch.
Despite the numerous advantages that can be presented supporting the use of open source solution one of its major draw back is security.
Open source by its nature makes all its code available to the world to download. This means not only developers can use these codes to modify and customize the solution for their clients but also hackers can use these codes to identify glitches and loopholes to penetrate the system.
Most of the open source solutions use a default database table names with an option to change them during installation process, for example Joomla CMS uses jos_, WordPress uses wp_, OsCommerce uses os_ table prefixes. These default table name prefixes makes your database more vulnerable to the hackers who uses various mechanism to bombard your database for a successful connection. Once a connection is made hackers are free to start posting data or steal data from your website or even replace your site content with a content of their choosing.
Another area of weakness is that not all files that come with the package are used by all website. Just the other day I was referred a client who maintains an e-commerce web store. His complain was that somehow he was receiving tons of email from the site that was blocking up his mailbox. Upon investigation I discovered that the solution he was using had an Ask a Question to the Seller button in the product description page that was disabled by the developer. However, since he was using an open source, and negligence of the developer I should say, that although the button code was disabled, the page that button lands on was not modified. The spammer was able to identify what open source solution the client was using, and then knowing such a file exists the spammer directly went to the Ask a Question page and started sending mails thousands of them every hour.
Even though an open source web solution may offer thousands of advantages if you do decide to use them be sure that you are well aware of the risks and ensure that all the vulnerabilities are secured.
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