SECURITY CONTROLS FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS BASED ON FREE SOFTWARE

Abstract

The Content Management Systems represent a Web technology widely used today, especially those based on Free Software such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Due to their wide dissemination, these systems are constantly attacked from the Internet, which has also meant an increase in cybersecurity incidents worldwide in this field, reaching tens of thousands of compromised web portals daily when critical vulnerabilities of security. Therefore, the purpose of the present investigation was to conceptualize and structure a set of security controls that could be applied systemically to the installations of web portals based on WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla and thus formalize the CMS as a layer of security in the strategy of defense in depth of the computer infrastructure. The research conceptualized a total of 29 security controls, distributed in seven different groups. 79% of these controls can be applied to other CMS and the rest can be taken as the basis for the determination of specific controls. The use of these security controls allows increasing the reasonable levels of security in this technology, in addition to guaranteeing better management of the computer security processes in the entities. As future work, studies focused on the design of metrics that can weigh the contribution of each control to security, and the development of automated mechanisms for its audit is proposed.