Fortrabbit Blog: Your responsibility: App security

On the Fortrabbit blog there's a post from Oliver Stark about securing your PHP application based on an experience they had with a recent support ticket.

A few days ago, late in the evening, we received a support ticket with the [message asking if their site had been hacked]. The support team started the conversation with the client and checked the domain routing first. It quickly became clear that the redirects to the phishing domain happened on our platform, so they searched the access logs for suspicious requests.

As they searched the logs, other similar requests showed up pointing back to a root.php file that seemed to be taking commands from URL parameters. This kind of script is called a "webshell" and is usually uploaded via a vulnerability with a plugin, poorly guarded upload forms or bad input validation. After some additional tracking, the vulnerability was located in the site's "vendor" folder that was web accessible. The post finishes with some recommendations to keep this from happening to you and your application including keeping dependencies up to date and preventing direct "vendor" folder access.