Shea Laughlin

caffeine, ramblings, and tech

Weekly Review – 04/24/2016

Weekly Review - Coffee

Hello from Texas!  Living Mile by Mile is now in progress.  Over the past few weeks, I haven’t posted in awhile in preparation for this adventure.  Also, I’ve been pondering about what I want to do with the blog – more updates soon!  Until then, here are some interesting reads.

Weekly Review – 05/24/2015

 

Weekly Review - Coffee

Most of you will probably be reading this on Monday (Memorial Day).  Please take a moment to remember what this day is about…  Ok, back to our usually scheduled programming.

Weekly Review – 11/18/2013

It’s a gloomy and dreary day here in MN.  Might need some vitamin B12 or something to go along with today’s daily dose of caffeine.

WordPress iOS App – Ugh!

This last weekend, I decided to join a blog challenge to see if I could write a blog post about an unknown topic for 30 plus days.  I started writing these posts using the WordPress iOS app on my iPhone5 and was thunderstruck again with angst.  I now remember why I dreaded writing with the WordPress iOS app…

  • Poor interface for creating bulleted lists/formatting text
  • Setting links to open in a new window requires you to know HTML
  • Tags do no auto populate
  • Preview doesn’t utilize your current theme

I wish it was more like Evernote…

WordPress Security

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/

Symptoms of Malware

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a few WordPress sites that I host (on Dreamhost) and manage were magically infected with some malware. In my case there were a few signs that this happened.

  • Random redirects while watching the files load in the browser.
  • The WP dashboard lost all of its styling
  • Google Chrome would not load the site because it contained malware
  • SLOW

Manual Remediation

  • Changed the FTP owner for all files.  You could take this one step further and create an FTP user for each one of your domains.
  • Changed the WP database password.  This has to be changed on my host and wp-config file.
  • Created new Authentication Unique Keys and Salts.
  • Changed the permissions of certain directories and files.  The .htaccess is a must change!
  • Enabled SFTP for editing and transfering files.  You could always get an SSL certificate for an additional layer of security.

Activated the Following Plugins

  • Exploit Scanner – Scans your WordPress site for possible exploits.
  • Password Reset Removed – […] want to remove the password reset/change option from WordPress, then this is what you have to do.
  • WordPress Firewall 2 – This plugin intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases, based on which field they appear within, in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.).
  • Limit Login Attempts – Does what it says.

After writing the draft of this post I found another blog post from wplift recommending Better WP Security and coincidentally, it does everything that the above plugins do  (with the exception of Password Reset Removed) and more!

Better WP Security – My Favorite Features

  • Scheduled database backups.  Backups can also be emailed!
  • Email notifications for file changes.
  • System status dashboard.
  • Easily activate new features with a simple check of a check box.
  • Intrusion detection and email notification.

Better WP Security – My Least Favorite Features

  • Tons of options – this can be overwhelming at first.
  • A lot of red text warning you that activating a certain feature could impact your theme or other plugins.
  •  I wasn’t able to get the “Hide Backend” feature to work, oh well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jveq2H4bZJY&w=580]

Additional References and Resources