Can't log in and the menus vanished on the site...

[P15-D24]

Out of the blue after running for years with no issues the menus vanished from my site. When I tried to log into the admin center I get the constant screen refresh of the login dialog. Checked with the ISP to see if they have made any recent changes and the last changes were made about 5 months ago. This problem appeared two day ago. I read the thread on admin logins and verified sessions.save_path is pointed to a write enabled dir via .htaccess override. (I'm running on a shared server so I can't modify the system wide php.ini. Php.info confirms the change is enabled. Checked the db and all tables are OK. Really would like to get the menus working so I can start a migration to a newer Joomla version. Any suggestions/fixes appreciated.

[sozzled]

You have my sympathy. "Out of the blue" I lost five J! 1.5 websites in roughly the same amount of time as it takes to say what I have just written. Ultimately it came down to making a decision as to whether it was worth the effort to restore these websites to their former "glory" (and then migrate them to J! 3.4) or remove all traces of them from the server where they were hosted. I took the latter course of action.

Over the past year or so I've had a couple of old J! 1.5 websites that were successfully hacked and I accept 99% of the blame; it's my own laziness—not investing the two or three days that it takes to migrate from J! 1.5 to J! 3.4.

Even today (with J! 3.4) one cannot remain compacent. My websites are continually targetted but they have not been successfully attacked due to vigilance, good management and good luck (I guess).

So, without knowing why your J! 1.5 website suddenly and inexplicably went awry, I could suggest that it's just one of those things that happens to people who have been using J! 1.5 for nearly four years past its end-of-life. My recommendation to [temporarily] fix the problem is to recover your website from the last good backup that you made before the recent problems started to appear. Apart from offering you my sympathy and understanding of what it's like when a J! 1.5 website stops working all of a sudden, I don't know what else I can suggest.

[P15-D24]

Somehow access to admin was compromised. I had about 20 unauthorized administrators and who knows what they did. Ended up deleting the site and starting fresh with 3.x. Was 1.6 susceptible to sql injection exploits?

[sozzled]

Was 1.6 susceptible to sql injection exploits?

The short answer to your question, for what it's worth (because J! 1.6 is nearly four years old), is yes. All versions of Joomla for the past year (or more)—including some of the early releases of J! 3.x—have been susceptible to a variety of security "holes".