Posts tagged “security”

Let’s play a game: what is wrong with this picture?

If you’re like me and only skimmed it, you would probably have not noticed anything off. In fact, what I did notice was cPanel warning me that the (redacted) domain in question was reaching the limit of the allowed space. OK cool, I added it to my Todo app and went on with my life.

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A few days ago a long-term client received a suspicious email which threatened to remove their inactive email accounts. Naturally the first thing they did was notify us. We immediately smelled a rat and asked them to forward the email to us for further investigation.

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Google has started notifying webmasters (via their Search Console) that starting in October 2017 Chrome (version 62) will show a “NOT SECURE” warning when users enter text in a form on an HTTP page, and for all HTTP pages in Incognito mode. This is in line with their efforts to move everyone towards a more secure web.

Is your website using secure communications with HTTPS/SSL?

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Website Backups have become a required part of modern website strategies. The sad truth is that websites today are threatened by hackers wanting to deface web pages, servers that unfortunately go down and malware that’s always trying to hijack your website traffic.

When trouble happens, fixing the problem can be very time and resource consuming. Sometimes the simplest solution is to restore your website to a known safe state using a Website Backup.

Introducing our Website Maintenance: Backup Package

Caveena Solutions is introducing our Website Maintenance: Backup Package specifically to address this need. With this package, your website will enjoy the safety of regular automated Website Backups for your peace of mind. On top of that, a copy of your Website Backups are stored off-site to further mitigate the risk of losing your website.

 

Get your Website Backup solution today!

 

You’ve probably heard the news already that WordPress websites are facing an XML-RPC Brute Force Amplification Attacks. But did you also know that Sucuri, iThemes and Wordfence already have you protected?

If you use Sucuri’s Website Application Firewall (WAF), the company has you covered:

Note that users of our WAF are already protected against this attack, so if you are on CloudProxy you are safe.

Similarly, the Wordfence Security Plugin has login protection that takes into account XML-RPC. Just remember to enable Login Security in the Wordfence Options.

Yes we do protect against brute force via XML-RPC and we have for some time now. We also protect against multiple attempts via a single XML-RPC call

Finally, the iThemes Security Plugin protects against XML-RPC Brute Force attacks (even the free version):

Brute Force Protection in iThemes Security just got more robust. Now when you enable Brute Force Protection this feature includes protection from XML-RPC attacks

Make sure your websites are protected!

Edit (16th October 2015): iThemes Security v5.1.0 and iThemes Security Pro v2.0.0 protect against the XML-RPC Brute Force Amplification Attacks.

New Feature: Added “Multiple Authentication Attempts per XML-RPC Request” setting to the WordPress Tweaks section. When this setting is set to “Block”, iThemes Security will block brute force login attacks against XML-RPC

Edit (15th October 2015): If you have Jetpack installed, the Protect Module also stops XML-RPC attacks.

I’ve been using BlockBadQueries on all my WordPress websites for quite some time now. And I just realized BlockBadQueries Pro was released in June. The Pro version offers more minute customization options than the free version though if you just want to set-and-forget I suggest sticking with the free version.

BlockBadQueries is based on the 5G Blacklist 2013 and the 6G Beta. So you could certainly copy the rules into your .htaccess file if (assuming you’re comfortable with Apache commands & regular expressions) you want to customize the rules for free.

After the recent security hole in Yoast SEO we now find an SQL Injection vulnerability in the popular WooCommerce plugin. Update now.

It goes without saying but if you are using the ever popular WordPress SEO by Yoast (and why wouldn’t you be? It’s an amazing SEO plugin for WordPress) then you need to update to version 1.7.4 immediately. A security vulnerability was discovered in the plugin which would allow bad things to happen.

Source: iThemes.

BackupBuddy by iThemes is a wonderfully simple solution for WordPress backup and migration. That is, when it works. On a hunch I decided to check my website backups and discovered that while database backups were fine BackupBuddy was failing to create full website backups. Even worse, emails that were supposed to notify me of the errors were not being delivered.

Yeah, that’s not good.

Now before you jump the gun and completely write-off iThemes, the TL;DR of this post is that there was nothing wrong with BackupBuddy; Acunetix WP Security had added an unreadable file to prevent directory listing. After adjusting some settings I got everything to work again.

If BackupBuddy is failing to create full website backups, check if unreadable files have been added to the file hierarchy. Take particular note of security plugins (e.g. from Acunetix & Sucuri).

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iThemes recently held a free two-part webinar discussing WordPress Security. The first video takes an introductory level approach but I still grabbed a couple good tips from it.

The second video talks about the company’s iThemes Security Plugin and also hosts a Q&A session with Chris Wiegman, the developer of iThemes Security, as well as Tony Perez, CEO of Sucuri. Unfortunately the sound was non-existent during Chris’s portion so you might want to skip that section until it’s fixed.

I found Tony’s section particularly interesting as he talks about higher-level approaches to security. He also touches on the wide-spread belief that using a shared host is less secure because you run the risk of other websites on that host being infected or hacked. The tl;dr is this does not happen much today with reputable web hosts (Tony specifically mentions BlueHost, HostGator and GoDaddy as being OK).

Here’s that portion of the video: