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Secure Your Wordpress Website How to Protect Yourself from Hackers, Spammers, Scrappers, and Imbeciles Secure Your WordPress Website How to Protect Yourself from Hackers, Spammers, Scrappers, and Imbeciles Mari Kane Blogsite Studio The Articles in this ebook are copyright Mari Kane. All rights reserved. No part of any of the content of this ebook may be reproduced in any form by any means without prior written permission of Mari Kane. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be shared or re-sold If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please subscribe to Blogsite Studio.com to receive your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author! This book was produced using Pressbooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML. Secure Your WordPress Website © Mari Kane, Blogsite Studio. All Rights Reserved, except where otherwise noted. Contents 1 INTRODUCTION 4 How to Take Control Of Your Web Presence Now 10 The Best Tips to Securing WordPress Websites and Keeping Hackers Out 15 The 27 Best WordPress Security Plugins to Prevent Hacking 21 Backup and Restore Your WordPress Site and Sleep Better at Night 29 WordPress Under Brute Force Attack: Targeting Admin Usernames 32 Use Mantras as Passwords to Achieve Web Nirvana 35 3 Ways to Protect Your Email Address From Hackers and Spammers 41 How to Kick Content Scrapers in the Balls 48 Damn that Referrer Spam from Google Analytics 53 How SSL CertiZcates Give Your URL the Cone of Silence 60 After the Hack: How to Restore Your WordPress Website 64 SOMETHING ABOUT MARI KANE ALL-RIGHTS- RESERVED 66 WORDPRESS EBOOKS BY MARI KANE ALL- RIGHTS-RESERVED SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE | 1 Introduction I remember a time after I started blogging when I never thought about web security. I lived in a cocoon of denial padded by the belief that my little wine blog contained nothing anyone would want to steal. No state secrets, no credit card information. I knew hackers were out there, but I believed they just hit sites for banks and retailers. That was my age of innocence. Then, I learned about brute force attacks and how hackers will use bots to bang on your login door until it breaks down. Once inside, they inject malware that turns a site into a zombie to spread the malware to visitor’s computers and sites. That was the end of my Internet innocence. In the last few years, my BlogsiteStudio.com site has been hacked a couple of times. The Zrst was due to a vulnerability in a plugin. The second was the result of a phishing attack that I fell for because of the coincidental timing related to another issue I was having on my server. Cleaning up the messes they left was a harrowing and infuriating experience, and a huge drain on time, not to mention expensive. I’ve seen client sites get hacked, possibly because of their unchanged “Admin” usernames, outdated versions of WordPress, plugin vulnerabilities – who knows what all. Cleaning them up was painful, especially when a current backup was not available and caused a loss of data. SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE | 2 Then, there is the scraping of email addresses, inadvertently left in the site’s content, which leads to a proliferation of spam coming to that email’s inbox. I’ve seen that happen too. Even neutral little Google Analytics is not above the fray. Fake sites use bots to send requests to a site so that the URL will turn up on your analytics dashboard and tempt you to click on the link to Znd out who the hell they are, which drives up their tra\c count. I tell you, it’s a bot-eat-bot world out there and you can no longer trust your little content site to remain safe. You have to take precautions to insure the safety of your site, and that’s what this ebook is all about: securing your WordPress website. The following chapters are all posts from BlogsiteStudio.com written over the past four years and updated to re[ect changes on the infobaun. I put them all together to show you what evil can befall an unprotected website and to give you a road map to protecting yours. And, how to recover from the nightmare of being hacked. If you’ve purchased this ebook from a retailer, please review it on their site and subscribe to Blogsite Studio.com to receive my weekly doses of advice as well as to have the Zrst opportunity to download future ebooks. Please follow me on Twitter @blogsitestudio, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. And contact me if you have any questions about WordPress. Thanks and enjoy Secure Your WordPress Website! Mari Kane @blogsitestudio SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE | 4 Chapter 1 How to Take Control Of Your Web Presence Now So you had a web site professionally designed and for the longest time your site worked swimmingly – until suddenly it doesn’t. You can’t get your “computer guy” on the phone, or in email, or by text, and you don’t have the logins to get into the Administrator Dashboard. Or, your domain stops resolving and you have no idea where it’s registered, and then you Znd out your web designer is on vacation. Don’t let this happen to you! If you have a website that is intrinsic to your business, you must make it your business to know everything about that site. A Website is like a house with a hundred working parts. A home owner would never leave the keys to their house in the hands of the real estate agent. Neither should you rely on your web designer to hold the keys to your site. I don’t just mean controlling your domain registration and WordPress installation, but also your hosting account, theme developer, Google accounts, and much more. All assets that require logins and email addresses in order to access their various settings. SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE | 5 Without these credentials you could be hobbled in an emergency. You might have contracted with a web agency or IT Zrm to manage all the intricacies of your web presence using state of the art systems and platforms. Or, your web designer might o]er to host your site on a server space they resell, and maintain your installation. It doesn’t matter if you work with a large or small web company, as long as you have all the logins to your properties. I spoke about this with Omer Segoly of TechTone, a Vancouver company that provides IT services and tech support. He said he often has new clients come to him who don’t know how to access their domain or their back end or who need to clean up a hack and their designer is unavailable. In those cases, he has to chase down accounts, and dig things up, which he says is not fun and is expensive for the client. He Znds the biggest issue is with domains. “Agencies and designers register domains under a big master account they maintain. So, instead of creating separate Godaddy accounts for each client’s domain, they amalgamate the domains on the master account, giving them ownership, in e]ect.” He told me a story of an agency where one partner walked away with all the credentials, leaving the other partner with no access to the client’s accounts. Not only do some agencies take ownership of domains, they overcharge for renewals. I see it again and again, when we know a domain should only cost $12 – $15 a year, some companies over bill much more than that. When we sign up new clients, we make sure they have access to all their web properties. We don’t take ownership of anything we make it easy for them to disengage if they need to, though we do such a good job they don’t. SECURE YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE | 6 Each of his new clients receives an email with Cpanel logins, ftp coordinates, nameservers, and IP address, with the advice to keep the message in a secure place for web designers they might hire in the future. I have seen companies that don’t do that, possibly because they have a low-tech server set-up that’s not segmented to diSerent accounts, so any access means access to all accounts on the server.” (Techtone uses Amazon Web Servers (AWS). When it comes to payment gateway, he says, clients must have full access from the get go. We’ll create a Stripe account for the client, give them access, and have them connect to their bank. Once it’s ready we’ll connect the APIs and take care of the rest, but we don’t take ownership over the payment gateway account ever. Omer is also a big fan of two-factor authentication and he likes Last Pass for managing passwords anywhere. How to take control of your web presence If you’ve got a professionally designed site, but you’re a little fuzzy on how it all works, here is a website checklist for auditing the site. As the site owner, you should know everything on this list. Start by checking whois.net to see what information is publicly available about your domain. DOMAIN Make sure your domain is registered with a reputable and certiZed registrar and that you yourself are the named administrator on the account.
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