2

I have a joomla 2.5 portal, recently i was attacked probably by a SQL injection or something, the fact is that all my DB was filled up with messy articles and a lot of users, i already cleaned up my items/articles using the k2 item administrator manually.

I found near to 30k users on my DB, delete them manually is a pain, i want to create my own SQL delete script to remove them all at once, but i am not sure what tables are involved in the user control and i don't want to corrupt my DB.

Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot!

2 Answers 2

2

That is a well-known issue, see post Preparing for K2 questions So, disable user registration in Joomla and possibly disable K2 user management unless your site need it very bad.

Needless to say that your site is outdated and that you need to update it ASAP, I'm sure you know that very well, especially after such spam-bomb attack your site have faced.

I have faced similar issue two years ago on one old site of my client. I remember well that I didn't want to go through manually deleting all spam-registered users, so I deleted ALL users directly via phpMyAdmin, even myself as logged admin, and then I re-created myself as admin user. But, that requires strong knowledge and experience in using phpMyAdmin, so I can't recommend it blindly to someone else.

3
  • 2
    Thanks for your answer Mirko, and yes i disabled the user registration in joomla to avoid unwanted user creation, i really don't need that. after some research i found that adding the parameter "limit=1000" to the URL under the user admin let me delete them by bigger batches just like this: yoursite.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_users&view=users&limit=1000
    – Israelm
    Mar 9, 2016 at 20:45
  • 1
    Great, glad you solved the clean-up, but don't rest until you update the site to latest Joomla. It's for your good...
    – Mikan
    Mar 9, 2016 at 20:48
  • 1
    @Israelm, please create a new answer with your solution as it is much better. Mar 22, 2017 at 2:24
0

After some research i found that adding the parameter "limit=1000" to the URL under the user admin let me delete them by bigger batches just like this: yoursite.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_users&view=u‌​sers&limit=100

Hope this helps someone else.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.