Wordpress Jedi » Hack Prevention

Increase WordPress Security with Secure WordPress

Wordpress Jedi — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:08:20 +0000

WordPress is a great platform for blogs and portals. A ton of people use this platform to bring their content online and share it all with the world. Unfortunately, that means you are going to have to deal with hacks attacks more often than those who are using an obscure platform. While the WordPress community is vigilant and on the top of major attacks, it can’t stop them all. That’s why all WordPress webmasters should take time to secure their blog to reduce the chances of their blog being hacked. You can’t stop all attacks, but you can surely make life difficult for hackers.

Secure WordPress is one impressive plugin that takes care of those small little details on your blog and lets you focus on more complex measures. For starters, it gets rid of tool-tips and those little error messages that hackers look out for. It gets rid of WordPress version information as well.

Every WordPress expert would tell you that you need to make sure you protect your plugins directory from wandering eyes of the public. You never know what information people can find out about your blog and its security flaws by going through your plugins. This plugin automatically adds an index.php file to your directory to increase your website’s security.

Secure WordPress gets rid of update information for your plugins and themes too. So if you have multiple members on your blog, only those with proper rights will get to see all those messages. To top if all off, you can get a free security scan for WordPress malware with this plugin.

Please keep in mind that you can do a lot of these steps by yourself. If you do not want to use a plugin to do the job for you, it will take you a bit of time to implement them. Secure WordPress does save you time though.

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Secure Your WordPress Install with Secure WordPress Plugin

Wordpress Jedi — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:16:05 +0000

WordPress is a great platform to start your blog with and even manage a large portal. But it’s not perfect. There are many ways hackers can find ways to gain control of your WordPress blog. The last thing you want to have on your hands is a hacked WordPress blog. For instance, did you know that your WordPress blog can be exposed to hack attacks if you proudly display its version on your website? If you have registered users or multiple authors on your blog, there are going to be even more issues you will have to deal with. Secure WordPress Plugin is a free security add-on for WP that lets you address some of those small issues on your blog.

Secure WordPress Plugin enables you to reduce hack attacks on your blog by protecting your installation information and plugin lists. It automatically adds an index.php file to your directories to make sure hackers can’t gain access to your plugin list to use known security wholes in some of them. It also removes theme, plugin, and core update information from non-admins. It can even protect your blog against malicious URL requests.

I also like the fact that the plugin deactivates tool-tip and error messages from your WordPress login page. These small details may not look too important, but there are many hackers out there who succeed in their jobs by taking advantage of this information. So it never hurts to make their life difficult.

This plugin is not designed to make your WordPress 100% hack-proof. So you are going to need other security plugins to help defend your blog against hackers. Nevertheless, the plugin is very easy to use and does fix a few common WordPress issues. It’s free too.

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Why You Should Get User Locker

Wordpress Jedi — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:10:00 +0000

WordPress is a great content management system that has somewhat leveled the playing field by allowing almost anyone to start a sophisticated blog without having to spend thousands of dollars developing a CMS from scratch. When you get started with blogging, you are probably not going get so many visitors. The early days are always going to be tough. But the last thing you want to do is take fundamental things for granted. By that I mean you shouldn’t assume for a second that just because you are not getting a lot of traffic, hackers are going to leave you alone. Your WordPress blog can be used by hackers to link out to their web properties or even as a tool to put harmful content on your users’ computers. Running a WordPress blog is a big responsibility, and you shouldn’t cut corners and forget about taking proper measures to keep your blog secured.

User Locker is a cool little plugin for WordPress that lets you protect your admin page against brute force and dictionary attacks. If you have a short password, your WordPress install can easily get hacked by a brute force attack. However, by using User Locker, you can lock users out after a few number of invalid tries.

I would encourage you to set this number to 3. Three tries should be enough for your users to get their username/password set right. And if they are who they say they are, they should have no trouble having their accounts activated again. They can always user the password lost feature to recover their password and unlock their account. In general, I am not a fan of allowing user registrations on my blog. It’s just too risky. But if you have to, you better make sure you take proper measures to protect your blog against hack attacks.

Download User Locker now. It’s free!