Prevent exposure of wp-config.php

From July to September in 2015, 33 types of malicious requests to attempt exposing the wp-config.php via vulnerable plugins and themes had been observed on my site. I analyzed all of them to identify if IP Location Block can block them or not.

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Impact on server load caused by brute-force attacks

I have examined the load reduction performance against brute-force attacks by using IP Location Block. I report the result in this article.

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Living with Jetpack

Jetpack is the Swiss army knife for your WordPress site. Plentiful awesome features are served for free by hooking to WordPress.com.

In this article, I show some notes related to living with Jetpack and IP Location Block.

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Analysis of Attack Vector against WP Plugins

On the WPScan Vulnerability Database maintained by Sucuri, we can find many new plugins and themes every month. Of course, WP-ZEP is not God Almighty against these. Then you may wonder about:

I’m with you!!

So I picked up the latest 50 vulnerabilities from WPScan DB, and dig into each attack vector one by one to investigate which can be prevented or not by WP-ZEP.

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Referrer Suppressor for external links

“Referrer Suppressor” which eliminate the browser’s referer is one of my favorite feature in IP Location Block.

It came to this plugin as a logical consequence of WP-ZEP. In this article, I’ll tell you the story.

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How does WP-ZEP prevent zero-day attack?

IP Location Block is the only plugin which has an ability to prevent zero-day attack even if some of the plugins in a WordPress site have unveiled vulnerability. I call it “Zero-day Exploit Prevention for WordPress” (WP-ZEP).

In this article, I’ll explain its mechanism and also its limitations. Before that, I’ll mention the best practice of plugin actions.

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Why so many WordPress plugins are vulnerable?

WordPress Vulnerability Statistics Source: © The WPScan Team

The above graph shows recent statistics of WordPress vulnerability from WPScan Vulnerability Database summarized by Sucuri which is a worldwide security company especially famous for analyzing vulnerability in WordPress.

Why so many vulnerabilities are there in WP plugins?

After reading the Sucuri Blog deeply and widely, I came to the conclusion that there is some kind of disuse and misuse of WordPress core functions.

I’d like to verify each vulnerability from this point of view.

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CloudFlare & CloudFront API class library

When you use CloudFlare or CloudFront as a reverse proxy service, you can retrieve a visitor’s IP address and country code from their special offered environment variables.

In this article, I’ll show you how to make use of their services.

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Shortcode for Geo Filtering

I started to develop IP Location Block as a security purpose plugin so as to protect the back-end of the site. And since version 3.0.0, it has been equipped with the functionality of front-end protection based on this suggestion at the support forum.

This helped to greatly improve the protection ability of this plugin against attacks via the front-end of the site.

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