Tag: Hacking

2 Simple Tips To Secure Your WordPress Installation And Uploads Directory

Lately, I’ve seen a flurry of WordPress attacks that uploads files or alters the WordPress core files to make your sites do things that they really shouldn’t do.

This nefarious tasks can range from using your site to email spam to making your site a billboard for online drugs sales and injecting visitors’ browsers with malware. You can imagine that it can be quite tricky to hunt these things down – or even be aware that they are happening if you’re not careful.

So here’s a few steps that you can take to ensure that your WordPress site is secure from these attacks. If you manage the server, then you might want to update your httpd.conf and add the following configuration.

<locationmatch "wp-content/uploads/.*\.(php\d?|phtml)$">
 AllowOverride None
 Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from All

What this does is prevent PHP files from being accessed from a browser. Our server is configured to allow PHP extensions with .php2 through to .php5 as well as .phtml. To prevent this from being accessed – I’m using a regular expression to find all of these file types. The AllowOverride directive will prevent any .htaccess files being used as well. If a script has managed to upload files to your server, there’s nothing to stop them allowing access back to the php files so this is necessary to prevent this.

This configuration applies to any location that is matched, which applies to all of your websites, rather than using the Directory method, which is based on the local file system.

Another security measure to consider is making the WordPress site read-only. I know that it’s a chore to manually update your site and plugins – but I have seen WordPress core files modified to inject headers and redirect certain requests. This is a complete pain to find, so save yourself the bother.

If you do find that your site is hacked – the first thing that you should try is to reinstall the WordPress core files. If you haven’t made the files read-only, then you can do this by clicking on the Dashboard > Updates link in WordPress and then click ‘Re-install Now’. This downloads and installs a fresh version of WordPress over your current core files with no configuration changes.

If you’re still noticing unusual behaviour, then you should try removing unnecessary plugins and themes and check the wp-config.php file in in your site.

If you at least use the above two tips, then the chances of your site being exploited are greatly reduced.

Reset your MediaWiki Sysop Password

When you’re stuck without sysop access to MediaWiki because you cannot remember the sysop details then there’s a handy maintenance script that’s available (if you’ve used the package manager) to reset the sysop username and password.

On Ubuntu server you can run the following command:

php /usr/share/mediawiki/maintenance/changePassword.php --user=sysop --password=password

The script will immediately reset your sysop username and password with what you have entered above.

Now you can log in without any problems!

Get Those Passwords

Today, I had to setup an Oki C5650 on a network, and find out how many pages had passed through it due to an surprisingly quick turnaround in toner. I was struggling to find the default admin password for the web interface as it wasn’t in the online manual.

Knowling that searching the internet is much better than my library abilities, I managed to find the password at Art of Hacking. In true form, there’s a very useful page that has user collected default passwords for thousands of devices. And in true hacking form, it’s called etc/passwd.

Reverse Engineering Passwords

Hashing passwords is a common way to secure them in a database and make sure that they cannot be read easily.

But did you know there’s a website that reverse engineers the hashes and stores them in a searchable database?

The folks over at RedNoize have created such a site.

Obviously, there’s no better protection than keeping your databases tightly secured – but even so, it may be worth considering putting extra abstraction on passwords – just to make it that little more difficult.