Category "Hack prevention"

How To Find Out If Your WordPress Site is Hacked

Cyrus - July 15, 2011 - Hack prevention

Nobody likes finding out that their website is hacked. No matter how much effort you have put forward to keep your website protected against hack attacks, you can’t stop every hacker. I don’t know about you but I would love to know when my site is hacked to take action immediately. WP Malwatch could give you a head start.

Not all hackers approach hacking the same way. But many of them add hidden files to your website as soon as they get in. Of course, they also make changes to your code and cover their tracks at the same time. WP Malwatch is designed to scan your PHP and .htaccess files to identify the ones that could have been compromised.

It is interesting to note that WP Malwatch can’t identify all hack attacks by itself. It does scan your files and can give you an idea where to look for potential security issues. Not all the files reported are infected. But you want to make sure they belong on your site. WP Malwatch won’t stop hackers by itself but can give you heads up if someone is messing with your site.

How To Add a Security Firewall To WordPress

Cyrus - March 6, 2011 - Hack prevention

No site is 100% hack-proof. No matter how much you spend on your security team, there are hackers out there who can find holes in your security system. Most small business owners and bloggers do not have enough money to get their own security team in place. But they are not defenseless against hackers. Adding a firewall to WordPress can keep inexperienced hackers out and protect your website against most obvious hack attacks. WordPress Firewall 2 is a powerful security plugin that does just that.

Add Safety Checks To Links In WordPress Sites

Cyrus - March 4, 2011 - Hack prevention

If you are the only person adding links to your WordPress blog, you probably have no excuse for linking to a site that contains malware or some kind of danger for your visitors. That is of course if you are not linking to a page that has been taken off afterward and replaced with a spammy one. People may post their links to your comment section from time to time too. Having a way to check these links before confidently clicking on each is not a bad idea. F-Secure Safe Links is a powerful plugin that lets you check all links on your web pages to make sure they are not leading to a dangerous website.

How To Limit Login Attempts in WordPress

Cyrus - February 23, 2011 - Hack prevention

Hacking is a huge issue for all webmasters. No one likes to work so hard to set up a killer website only to have some stranger hack it and steal its search engine rankings and content. Most hackers are not experienced enough to try sophisticated tactics on sites (thankfully). So they rely on bots and brute force attacks to gain access to your admin panel. Unfortunately, WordPress does not have a built-in functionality to thwart these types of attacks. Limit Login Attempts is a powerful plugin that lets you limit the number of times one can enter wrong username/password sets. It can bans IPs for you so you don’t have to.

Limit Login Attempts can have multiple benefits for your WordPress website. For starters, it can automatically take care of people who want to abuse your website. If they try too many wrong username/password sets, they get blocked or banned. The app does log abusers’ IPs, so you can block them forever using your .htaccess file. I do recommend reducing the number of allowed retries to 3. Reducing the number of allowed lockouts before increasing lockout time is wise too.

I love the lockout email feature. I have set that to 1 on my site. That means as soon as someone gets locked out once, I’ll get a reminder to deal with the abuser. This is especially useful if you have set up WordPress sites to use sometime in the future but don’t want to worry about them getting hacked till then.

Limit Login Attempts does not keep your blog safe against all hack attacks. It can reduce the chances of it happening though. A must have plugin for every blog.