Hardening WordPress is An Art

My presentation for First-ever WordCamp Colombo 2017, Sri Lanka

#wccmb

Transcript

1. Hardening WordPress is an Art
2. Who am I Chathu Vishwajith Auth0 Ambassador Co-Founder of a startup
3. Alex Proimos from Sydney, Australia
4. Is WordPress is secure? → 52% are from WordPress plugins → 37% are from core WordPress → 11% are from WordPress themes
5. Recent incidents
6. Recent Incidents → Display Widgets → WooCommerce Product Vendors → WordPress Security Update 4.8.2 – Update Immediately!
7. Types of vulnerabilities → SQL Injection (SQLI) → Cross-site Scripting (XSS) → Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) → Brute Force → Denial of Service (DoS) → Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) → Full Path Disclosure (FPD) → User Enumeration → Remote Code Execution (RCE) → Remote File Inclusion (RFI) → Directory Traversal
8. So what is the Art
9. Continuous improvements
10. Find a secured hosting
11. Don’t forget to update!
12. Don’t forget to update! → Keep your WordPress up-to-date → Update your plugins and themes → Change passwords periodically → Keep yourself updated
13. Use your own, not defaults!
14. Use your own, not defaults! → Do not use ‘admin’ as your username → Change WP_CONFIG’s keys and salt values to randomly generated values → Change table prefix
15. Stop directory indexing
16. Prevent User emumaration
17. Disable XML-RPC if not using
18. Limit login failed attempts
19. Backup regularly
20. Remove unused plugins/themes
21. Turn on Comments approval
22. Use HTTPS! Atleast wp-admin area and wp-login.php
23. Make sure Debugging is off!
24. Apache, PHP, NGINX, SSL Vulnerabilities
25. WordPress Vulnerability Database https://wpvulndb.com
26. WordPress Vulnerability Scanner https://github.com/RamadhanAmizudin/ Wordpress-scanner
28. Summery → Don’t forget to update. → Use your own rather defaults. → Stop directory traversal. → Disable XML-RPC if you are not using it. → Limit login attempts. → Backup regularly → Remove unused plugins/themes → Keep yourself updated
29. From Sri Lanka !
30. Thank you !