WORDPRESS SECURITY AUDIT

You probably don’t know this, but every day, there are probes trying to get into your WordPress account; they are always searching for security weaknesses and if you fail to do some WordPress security audit on your site, you never can tell, they might eventually get it. These probes are generally looking for weaknesses, and most times, the location of your webmail or your website’s MySQL database. There are chances that they might also be looking for a previous hacker’s file located on your website server space in order to gain full control of your website.

Therefore, the security of your website falls in your hands. So, if you are there thinking the security of your website is the responsibility of your hosting provider, then you need to have a rethink. Your website host, WordPress in this case, is majorly concerned about the security of their servers and all of the applications they run on them. They don’t care a bit about the scripts and applications you run.

Since the people probing your website barely use an IP address more than once, it will be difficult for you to block them by banning their IP addresses from gaining access to your website. Probes use different proxy servers and different names; some common ones include, Toata, Wantsfly and Morfeus. In one session, a typical probe can take up to 50 attempts in order to locate different combinations of directory folder names or common locations. So, in order to minimize the risk of the probes getting what they want, you need to run a WordPress Security Audit.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to utilize the services of the WordPress security exploit scanner plugin.

WORDPRESS VIRUS SCANNER

This plugin is one of the best scanners when it comes to detecting signs of suspicious activity on your website. It scans every database and file, searching for compromised files that have been uploaded or left on your website by hackers. To keep your website safe you have to scan website for malware at least once a week. Hackers leave a trail of modified contents and scripts whenever they compromise a website. These contents and scripts can be found by searching through every file on the website, manually. Some methods used by hackers to hide their spam links or codes are very obvious. For instance, they make use of CSS to hide text; these strings are the things we can search for. Contents can also be hidden in the database, and codes can also be run in the database. Spam links are sometimes placed amongst the comments and also on blog posts. Search engines will notice them but the visitors of your website will not see them because they are hidden by CSS. In an attack launched on WordPress some time ago, hackers exploited the WP plugin system in order for them to run their own codes. Files with the extension of image files were uploaded and added to the list of active plugins. Therefore, despite the fact that the files didn’t have a .php extension, the codes that had been written in them were still able to run.

This plugin goes through your website and tries to bring out all of these changed database records and files. It is the perfect plugin for the audit of your WordPress.

CHECKING YOUR WEBSITE’S SECURITY?

One easy way to check WordPress security is to check WordPress’ stats for 404 file not found errors. If you notice a lot of errors for file locations and files that literally don’t exist on your website, then your site is being probed for weakness that could be exploited. You need to make routine checks of your own website folders and file so as for you to determine the ones that you haven’t installed. If you should find anything, make sure to first check with your website host in order to ascertain that they haven’t installed what you found before deleting them. Sometimes these files cannot be deleted by you, you will need the help of your site’s administrator in order to delete them.