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Security is an interesting topic, with a lot of shades of grey. WordPress developers take security very seriously, but as with any other system, there are potential security issues that may arise and there is always a tradeoff between security and convenience. We will go through some common things you can do to keep your WordPress installation secure.
What is security? Fundamentally, security is not about perfectly uncrackable systems, which might well be impossible to find and/or maintain. Security has more to do with trust and responsiveness. For example, a trusted host runs a stable, patched branch of their webserver (be it Apache, IIS, or whatever). They should tell you this, test their configuration themselves, and let you determine it for yourself. An untrusted host does not apply patches when they are released and does not tell you what server versions they are running.
Several themes run through this guide:
Make sure the computers you use to post to WordPress are free of spyware, malware, adware, and virus infections; and are running secure, stable versions of your applications. For example, none of the following makes the slightest difference if there is a keylogger on your PC.
WordPress could have vulnerabilies as a result of how the program is written that allow an attacker to pass HTTP arguments, bad URI strings, form input, etc, that could cause Bad Things to happen.
There are two ways to deal with this problem:
The webserver running WordPress, the database with the WordPress data, PHP and any other scripting/programming language used for plugins or helper apps could have vulnerabilities. Therefore, make sure you are running secure, stable versions of your web server, database, scripting interpreter, or make sure you are using a trusted host that takes care of these things for you.
It should also be mentioned that if you're on a shared server (one that hosts other people besides yourself) if someone else is compromised, then it's very likely you could be compromised too even if you follow everything in this guide. Be sure to ask your web host what security precautions they take.
The network on both ends -- the WordPress server side and the client network side -- should be trusted. That means updating firewall rules on your home router and being careful about what networks you work from. A busy Internet cafe where you are sending passwords in cleartext over an unencrypted wireless connection is not a trusted network (The following article describing how to secure your email when using a wireless connection in a public place can be extended as a way of securely accessing you blog over ssh tunnels). Your host should be making sure that their network is not poisoned by hackers, and you should do the same. Network vulnerabilities allow passwords to be intercepted via sniffers and other sorts of havoc (such as man-in-the-middle attacks) to happen.
Some vulnerabilities can be avoided by good security habits. An important element of this are passwords: do not use your own name for your password, do not use a dictionary word (from any language) for your password, do not use a 4 character string of numbers as your password. Your goal with your password is to make the search space as large as possible, so using numbers and varying capitalization all make it more difficult, statistically, to brute force a password. This is particularly important if you do not rename the administrator account. In that case half the puzzle is already solved for malicious users as they know what username will give them significant privileges to edit files and databases. The Automatic Password Generator can be helpful in generating reasonably complex passwords.
Some of WordPress' cool features come from allowing some files to be writable by web server. However, letting an application have write access to your files is a dangerous thing, particularly in a public environment.
It is best, from a security perspective, to lock down your file permissions as much as possible and to loosen those restrictions on the occasions that you need to allow write access, or to create special folders with more lax restrictions for the purpose of doing things like uploading images.
Here is one possible permission scheme.
All files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you. Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the webserver.
/ -- the root Wordpress directory: all files should be writable only by your user account.
.htaccess if you want WordPress to automatically generate rewrite rules for you/wp-admin/ -- the WordPress administration area: all files should be writable only by your user account. /wp-includes/ -- the bulk of WordPress application logic: all files should be writable only by your user account. /wp-images/ -- image files used by WordPress: all files should be writable only by your user account. /wp-content/ -- variable user-supplied content: intended by Developers to be completely writable by all (owner/user, group, and public).
/wp-content/themes/ -- theme files. If you want to use the built-in theme editor, all files need to be group writable. If you do not want to use the built-in theme editor, all files can be writable only by your user account /wp-content/plugins/ -- plugin files: all files should be writable only by your user account. other directories under /wp-content/ should be documented by whatever plugin / theme requires them. Permissions may vary.For Directories
find [your path here] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
For Files
find [your path here] -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
You have to omit to use this command for /wp-includes/.
If you run multiple blogs on the same server, it is wise to consider keeping them in separate databases each managed by a different user. This is best accomplished when performing the initial WordPress installation. This is a containment strategy: if an intruder successfully cracks one of WordPress installation, this makes it that much harder to alter your other blogs.
If you administer MySQL yourself, ensure that you understand your MySQL configuration and that unneeded features (such as accepting remote TCP connections) are disabled. See Secure MySQL Database Design for a nice introduction.
You can greatly enhance the security of your blog by adding additional access control to your /wp-admin/ folder using the AskApache Password Protection plugin. This plugin also secures your /wp-login.php file, and all files in your /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/ folders.
Caution: Installing the AskApache Password Protection plugin may lock you out of your WordPress Admin panel and return an error 500 when you attempt to go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You might try installing the plugin on a test site first, as your server or other configurations may cause issues. To uninstall the plugin, first delete the new .htaccess file that appears inside your wp-admin folder. Then log in to your site and deactivate (and then possibly delete) the plugin. See the comments under the author's plugin home page to read other users' experiences with this plugin.
Adding server-side password protection to /wp-admin/ adds a 2nd layer of protection around your blog's admin area, login, and files. This forces an attacker or bot to attack this 2nd layer of protection instead of your actual admin files. Most of the time WordPress attacks are carried out autonomously by a malicious software bot.
The most common attacks against a WordPress blog usually fall into 2 categories.
By adding a 2nd layer of protection around these important files you force the attackers to have to break through that before they can even attempt to attack your main /wp-admin/. This protection uses Basic HTTP Authentication, the password is passed over the network uuencoded as plain text, not encrypted. The main benefit of this protection is in denying access to your servers files and alerting you to an attack against your blog before the attack reaches your /wp-admin/ doorstep.
The ultimate implementation of this "2nd layer" password protection is to require an HTTPS SSL encrypted connection for your /wp-admin/ directory, so that all communications and sensitive data is encrypted.
You can secure and encrypt all of your communication and important WordPress cookies using the Admin-SSL plugin. Works with Private and Shared SSL.
The WP Security Scan Plugin can be downloaded at WP Security Scan. While this helps tremendously to protect your WordPress installation, you still need to maintain good passwords, check plugins and themes before installing them, and keep good backups of your files and database in the event that you do get hacked.
If a plugin wants write access to your WordPress files and directories, please read the code to make sure it is legit or check with someone you trust. Possible places to check are the Support Forums and IRC Channel.
As we said, part of the goal of hardening WordPress is containing the damage done if there is a successful attack. Plugins which allow arbitrary PHP or other code to execute from entries in a database effectively magnify the possibility of damage in the event of a successful attack.
A way to avoid using such a plugin is to use custom page templates that call the function. Part of the security this affords is active only when you disallow file editing within WordPress.
Security through obscurity is typically thought to be an unsound primary strategy. However, there are areas in WordPress where obscuring a bit could help with security:
update tableprefix_users set user_login='newuser' where user_login='admin';, or by using a MySQL frontend like phpMyAdmin.Backup your data regularly, including your MySQL databases (see Backing Up Your Database). Data integrity is critical for trusted backups. Encrypting the backup, keeping an independent record of MD5 hashes for each backup file, and/or placing backups on read-only media (such as CD-R) increases your confidence that your data has not been tampered with.
A sound backup strategy could include keeping a set of regularly-timed snapshots of your entire WordPress installation (including WordPress core files and your database) in a trusted location. Imagine a site that makes weekly snapshots. Such a strategy means that if a site is compromised on May 1st but the compromise is not detected until May 12th, the site owner will have pre-compromise backups that can help in rebuilding the site and possibly even post-compromise backups which will aid in determining how the site was compromised.
It is possible to log all $POST variables sent to WordPress. Standard Apache logs do not offer much help with dealing with security forensics.
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