Protect Against Brute-force/Proxy Login Attacks

[ Solomon Grundy of the Legion of Doom ]

For the past week, I’ve been monitoring activity from a set of IP addresses involved with brute-force login attacks. Brute-force login attacks involve systematic guessing of passwords using various common usernames such as “admin” and “username”. So for example, an attack will target an array of sites, use “admin” as the username, and then make numerous attempts at “guessing” your password. And to obfuscate their malicious activity, the attack is executed from multiple IP addresses, either via proxy or possibly […] Continue reading »

Clean Markup Widget for WordPress

Squeaky clean. When adding content to your sidebar, it’s nice to be able to output clean, well-formatted markup. There are several ways to do this, including adding HTML directly in the theme template, installing a plugin, or simply using a widget. Widgets provide a great way of customizing sidebars and other widgetized areas, but as you may have seen in the source-code, the HTML is treated with all sorts of additional attributes, elements, and classes. Sometimes, you just need a […] Continue reading »

Tale of a Hacked Website

[ Prise de la Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel (Detail) ]

I love a good story. Almost as much as I enjoy securing websites. Put them together and you’ve got suspense, intrigue, and plenty of encoded gibberish. But no happy ending this time, in this case the smartest decision was to “pull it” and rebuild. The site was just wasted — completely riddled with malicious code. Without current backup data, it would’ve been “game over” for the site, and possibly the business. Continue reading »

Ron Paul 2012 WordPress Plugin

[ Screenshot: RP2012 Plugin - Circle style ]

I wanted to show support for Ron Paul on my WordPress website with a simple badge or button. Surprised at not finding any plugins for Ron Paul in the Directory, I decided to be the first. You can learn more in the following post, or download and install via the WordPress Plugin Directory. Or if you prefer, you can install direct via the comfort of the WP Admin Area, via Plugins > Add New. Just search for “Ron Paul 2012” […] Continue reading »

6G Firewall Beta

Since releasing the 5G Blacklist earlier this year, malicious server scans and bad requests have surged with more novel attacks than I’ve seen since first getting into this stuff six years ago. In other words, now is the time to beef up security and lock things down. If you’re into monitoring your server and knowing your traffic, you may be observing the same recent spike in malicious activity. In response to these attacks, I’ve been secretly working on the next […] Continue reading »

WordPress Add-on for 5G Blacklist

Ill requests and malicious scans have been spiking recently, to the point where server performance was really taking a hit. One scan in particular hammered the server with thousands of bad requests in just a few minutes. There are people out there with strong scripts and small minds that are constantly scanning sites for vulnerabilities, and much of what I’ve seen is aimed primarily at WordPress. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: GA Google Analytics

I’ve joked that there a million different Google Analytics WordPress plugins available, but I’ve never been able to find one that’s just dead-simple, plug-n-play, and with clean code and markup, so I wrote my own that does just that: a no-frills way to add the new Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code to all pages on your WordPress-powered site. This analytics plugin is lightweight, fast, and now has over 50,000 80,000 active users via WordPress.org. Continue reading »

5G Blacklist 2012

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. If you’re tired of all the slow, bloated security plugins and expensive 3rd-party services, the 5G Blacklist is a solid solution to help protect your Apache-powered site. Continue reading »

5G Blacklist for Microsoft IIS

By design the 5G Blacklist works on Apache servers, but thanks to Scott Stawarz, here is a version for Microsoft IIS. Disclaimer: I do not use any Microsoft server stuff, so make sure to properly test everything before running this code on a live/production site. Also, if you scroll down to the end of this article, you will find some useful bonus snippets. Continue reading »

Building the 5G Blacklist

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 […] Continue reading »

Huge Collection of Code Snippets: HTAccess, PHP, WordPress, jQuery, HTML, CSS

Please excuse this self-serving, miscellaneous post, but I’ve just got to purge all of these code snippets and scraps collected over the years. Whenever I update this site, I place any removed/unused code snippets into a giant note file for future reference, just in case. There’s all sorts of different types of code and snippets that just keep growing and growing and.. and finally it gets to a point where I just need to dump everything and start fresh. Welcome […] Continue reading »

Block Tough Proxies

If you want to block tough proxies like hidemyass.com, my previously posted .htaccess methods won’t work. Those methods will block quite a bit of proxy visits to your site, but won’t work on the stealthier proxies. Fortunately, we can use a bit of PHP to keep them out. Continue reading »

10 Characters for Your WordPress Blacklist

[ Screenshot: Comment Spam in Moderation ]

Quick WordPress tip for easily and quietly blocking a ton of comment spam. Akismet and other programs are good at catching most spam, but every now and then a bunch of weird, foreign-language spam will sneak past the filters and post live to your site. Here’s a good example of the kind of stuff that’s easy to block: Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: User Submitted Posts

User Submitted Posts enables your visitors to submit posts and images from anywhere on your site via template tag or shortcode. User-submitted posts optionally include tags, categories, post titles, and more. You can set submitted posts as draft, publish immediately, or after some number of approved posts. Also enables users to upload multiple images when submitting a post. Everything super-easy to customize via Admin Settings page. Continue reading »

5G Firewall Beta

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. Continue reading »

What a Malicious Server Scan Looks Like

Like most sites on the Web, Perishable Press is scanned constantly by malicious scripts looking for vulnerabilities and exploit opportunities. There is no end to the type and variety of malicious URL requests. It all depends on the script, the target, and the goal of the attack. Malicious scripts generally seek one of two things: Continue reading »

« Newer Posts • 1…56789…13 • Previous Posts »