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Web Dev + WordPress + Security
57 posts

BBQ Firewall – Customize Features

BBQ Firewall is a lightweight, super-fast plugin that protects your site against a wide range of threats. BBQ checks all incoming traffic and quietly blocks bad requests containing nasty stuff like eval(, base64_, and excessively long request-strings. This is a simple yet solid solution for sites that are unable to use a strong Apache/.htaccess firewall. Continue reading »

7G Firewall: September 2020 Update

Pleased to announce that the 7G Firewall is updated to version 1.3 (September 3rd, 2020). Now available for download, 100% free and open-source as always. Continue reading »

7G Out of Beta

The 7G Firewall was released about a year ago as beta, and has had time now to mature/develop into a stable release. So this is just a heads up that 7G is now officially out of beta and ready for use in live/production environments. Continue reading »

7G Addon: Stop Aggressive Scanning for Uploads-Related Targets

Around the end of December 2019 and then now well into January of 2020, I’m seeing a massive spike in aggressive malicious scanning for uploads-related targets. In particular, there are massive numbers of requests for URL targets involving uploadify, plupload, and similar. Typical scans hitting upwards of 30K–50K requests per attack. Just relentless exploit scanning on steroids. Continue reading »

How to Block IPs with 6G Firewall

This quick post is aimed at users of the 6G Firewall. The latest 6G update removes the IP-address blocking section to improve firewall compatibility and implementation. So now with the IP section removed, you may be asking “how to block an IP address with 6G?” Well good news, this tutorial explains how to do it. Continue reading »

ALL Security is Security Thru Obscurity

ob·scure adjective 1. not discovered or known about; uncertain. In the purely literal sense, the concept of obscurity applies to every transaction on the Web. The HTTP request knows not, nor could possibly know, the actual response it will receive from the server. There is only expected response. Online nothing is certain until it is. Continue reading »

7G Firewall : Log Blocked Requests

This tutorial explains how to log requests that are blocked by the 7G Firewall. This is useful for testing, debugging, and just keeping an eye on things. Learn how to log requests from Apache mod_rewrite and download my custom 7G logging script. It’s a complete example that shows how to log rewrite requests via PHP. All open source and free :) Continue reading »

7G Firewall

The 7G Firewall is here! 7G is now out of beta and ready for production sites. So you can benefit from the powerful protection of the latest nG Firewall (aka nG Blacklist). The 7G Firewall offers lightweight, server-level protection against a wide range of malicious requests, bad bots, automated attacks, spam, and many other types of threats and nonsense. Continue reading »

Automatic IP Blacklist

Recently a reader going by the name of Rock Star sent me a cool little PHP script that automatically updates your site’s .htaccess with a current list of bad IP addresses. This is useful because it gives you better “real time” protection against attacks and malicious requests. This tutorial shares the code and explains how to implement in two easy steps. Continue reading »

Enable PHP fsockopen with CSF

Recently started some sites with Liquid Web hosting, everything going extremely well all around. There was one hiccup (at least for me) where PHP’s fsockopen was not working. At the time, I was trying to figure out why the Whois Lookup feature used by Blackhole Bad Bots was not working. Initial investigation revealed that fsockopen() external HTTP requests were getting blocked somewhere. Everything else worked, including making the requests via cURL. Continue reading »

Welcome
Perishable Press is operated by Jeff Starr, a professional web developer and book author with two decades of experience. Here you will find posts about web development, WordPress, security, and more »
.htaccess made easy: Improve site performance and security.
Thoughts
Fun tool for visualizing how different internet protocols work.
Working on a complete redesign of Perishable Press :)
The Office is Cheers with more irony.
More fine-grained control of macOS screen brightness: hold down Option + Shift before pressing either of the brightness keys. You get 64 increments instead of the usual 16.
REST Pro Tools featured in David McCan’s new video on locking down WordPress.
Gonna try exercise.
Launching my new plugin, REST Pro Tools 🛠️ Granular control of the WP REST API.
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