HTAccess Archive

5G Blacklist 2012

Posted on January 11, 2012 in HTAccess, Security by Jeff Starr

[ 5G ] The 5G Blacklist helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website. It’s one of many ways to improve the security of your site and protect against evil exploits, bad requests, and other nefarious garbage.

After extensive beta testing, the 5G Blacklist/Firewall is solid and ready to help secure sites hosted on Apache servers. In addition to beta testing for the 5G, this is the 5th major update of my “G”-series blacklists. Here is a quick overview of its evolution:

WordPress MultiSite Subdomains on MAMP

Posted on September 28, 2011 in HTAccess, WordPress by Jeff Starr

Developing WordPress sites on a local MAMP server provides flexibility, privacy, and security throughout the development process. Setting up a WordPress environment on MAMP is definitely worth the effort, especially if you’re building and testing multiple sites using WordPress’ built-in MultiSite functionality.

The easiest and recommended way of setting up WordPress MultiSite is to use sub-directories. So when you create a new site named “business”, it will be located at http://localhost/business/. Here’s a mini-tutorial on how to use sub-domains for your network sites.

Building the 5G Blacklist

Posted on September 23, 2011 in HTAccess, Security by Jeff Starr

Protecting your website is more important than ever. There are a million ways to do it, and this is one of them. In fact, it’s what I use to protect Perishable Press and other key sites. It’s called the 5G Blacklist, and it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time. The idea is simple enough: analyze bad requests and block them using a firewall/blacklist via .htaccess. Now in its 5th generation, the 5G Blacklist has evolved into a considerably solid method of keeping your site safe and secure. How does it work? I’m glad you asked..

Clean Up Malicious Links with HTAccess

Posted on February 15, 2011 in HTAccess by Jeff Starr

I recently spent some time analyzing Perishable Press pages as they appear in the search results for Google, Bing, et al. Google Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of information about crawl errors, as well as the URLs of any pages that link to missing content. Combined with your site’s access/error logs, you have everything needed to track down 404 errors and clean up your listings in the search engine results.

5G Firewall Beta

Posted on February 9, 2011 in HTAccess, Security by Jeff Starr

Update 2012/01/25 — Official release version: 5G Blacklist 2012. The beta version provided in this post is now for reference only.

Updating the 4G Blacklist, the new 5G Firewall is now open for beta testing. The new code is better than ever, providing wider protection with less code and fewer false positives. I’ve had much success with this new firewall, but more testing is needed to ensure maximum compatibility and minimal issues.