Process Diary
Lynda week 6
Dear Diary,
Yep, more monitoring and securing to be done before all of the hard work of my fully developed site goes out there. Safety first Diary, make sure it’s always safety first! Check out all of this information to keep a site safe:
- Provide instructions for securing your login page. You can secure your login page by limiting login attempts. There are many plug-ins for this. If you use the plug-in Cerber Limit Login Attempts you would go to plug-ins on the dashboard, download and install it. Default settings are ok but you can adjust them by choosing the number of attempts allowed. You can change the notifications and in the “proactive security rules” it’s best to uncheck “non existent users” and “redirect dash board requests”. When done make sure you “save changes”.
- What is user enumeration? User enumeration refers to a technique that enables an attacker to get the usernames that are registered at your site. With this information they can attack the login page and gain access to the admin area.
- How can you monitor admin users? You can monitor them by adding an activity log plug-in. There again are many different plug-ins for this. If you use the plug-in Activity Log the default settings are all ok, you may just want to set up notifications and “save changes”.
- What is hotlinking? Hotlinking is when a website, without permission, links directly to a resource that is hosted on a different server. It’s kind of like stealing your bandwidth.
- What are some other ways you can protect your site. Just list these. Be careful applying these methods, because if you are not careful, you can break your site. There are many different plug-ins and code you can add to protect your website. Some of the code that you can add to the configure file and htaccess file are: protect installation page / stop automated spam / detect and block bad bots / firewall your site / control proxy access / control admin area. You can also add vulnerability plug-ins, make sure plug-ins are all current and active, make sure usernames are not the same as the display names, and keep themes updated.
Now I know that it’s important to check things, research, review, explore, learn, read and batten down the hatches!
Ahoy matey,
Karen