Firewall For Your WordPress Blog

Defend Your Blog

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, your WordPress blog)

In the military, they call it “hardening targets” when they take steps to make it harder for the enemy to attack an asset. Here in the real world, it’s hard to think like that. But not thinking like this could cost you time, money, reputation and frustration.

I know from first hand experience.

When I started this series, it was in response to the attack my personal hosting account suffered. And because it was my hosting account, and not a single blog, but rather every single one of my sites was hit.

Take my advice and harden your assets now.

WordPress Firewall

The second recommendation in the series is that you go and install WordPress Firewall. This one takes a little more to setup, but guards against a wider range of threats.

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night. Its features include:

  • Detect, intecept, and log suspicious-looking parameters — and prevent them compromising WordPress.
  • Also protect most WordPress plugins from the same attacks.
  • Optionally configure as the first plugin to load for maximum security.
  • Respond with an innocuous-looking 404, or a home page redirect.
  • Optionally send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack.
  • Turn on or off directory traversal attack detection.
  • Turn on or off SQL injection attack detection.
  • Turn on or off WordPress-specific SQL injection attack detection.
  • Turn on or off blocking executable file uploads.
  • Turn on or off remote arbitrary code injection detection.
  • Add whitelisted IPs.
  • Add additional whitelisted pages and/or fields within such pages to allow above to get through when desirable.

(More about the Injection Security Filters)

Download: WordPress Firewall plugin here

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About the Site Owner

Cenay is a self-proclaimed geek with mad technical skills she loves sharing with Videos, Coaching and Articles. Need help? Click the Book 30 Minutes to find out if this is a good fit.

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