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WordPress 3 Ultimate Security

WordPress 3 Ultimate Security

Protect your WordPress site and its network

        Read more about this book      

(For more resources on WordPress, see here.)

How proactive we can be depends on our hosting plan. Then again, harping back to my point about security’s best friend—awareness—even Automattic bloggers could do with a heads-up. Just as site and server security each rely on the other, this section mixes the two to outline the big picture of woe and general despair.

The overall concern isn’t hard to grasp. The server, like any computer, is a filing cabinet. It has many drawers—or ports—that each contain the files upon which a service (or daemon) depends. Fortunately, most drawers can be sealed, welded shut, but are they? Then again, some administrative drawers, for instance containing control panels, must be accessible to us, only to us, using a super-secure key and with the service files themselves providing no frailty to assist forcing an entry. Others, generally in our case the web files drawer, cannot even be locked because, of course, were it so then no one could access our sites. To compound the concern, there’s a risk that someone rummaging about in one drawer can internally access the others and, from there, any networked cabinets.

Let’s break down our site and server vulnerabilities, vying them against some common attack scenarios which, it should be noted, merely tip the iceberg of malicious possibility. Just keep smiling.

 

Physical server vulnerabilities

Just how secure is the filing cabinet? We’ve covered physical security and expanded on the black art of social engineering. Clearly, we have to trust our web hosts to maintain the data center and to screen their personnel and contractors. Off-server backup is vital.

 

Open ports with vulnerable services

We manage ports, and hence differing types of network traffic, primarily with a firewall. That allows or denies data packets depending on the port to which they navigate.

FTP packets, for example, navigate to the server’s port 21. The web service queues up for 80. Secure web traffic—https rather than http—heads for 443. And so on. Regardless of whether or not, say, an FTP server is installed, if 21 is closed then traffic is denied.

So here’s the problem. Say you allow an FTP service with a known weakness. Along comes a hacker, exploits the deficiency and gains a foothold into the machine, via its port. Similarly, every service listening on every port is a potential shoo-in for a hacker.

Attacking services with a (Distributed) Denial of Service attack
Many in the blogging community will be aware of the Digg of death, a nice problem to have where a post’s popularity, duly Digged, leads to a sudden rush of traffic that, if the web host doesn’t intervene and suspend the site, can overwhelm server resources and even crash the box. What’s happened here is an unintentional denial of service, this time via the web service on port 80.
As with most attacks, DoS attacks come in many forms but the malicious purpose, often concentrated at big sites or networks and sometimes to gain a commercial or political advantage, is generally to flood services and, ultimately, to disable HTTP. As we introduced earlier, the distributed variety are most powerful, synchronizing the combined processing power of a zombie network, or botnet, against the target.

 

Access and authentication issues

In most cases, we simply deny access by disabling the service and closing its port. Many of us, after all, only ever need web and administration ports. Only? Blimey!

Server ports, such as for direct server access or using a more user-friendly middleman such as cPanel, could be used to gain unwanted entry if the corresponding service can be exploited or if a hacker can glean your credentials. Have some typical scenarios.

Buffer overflow attacks

This highly prevalent kind of memory attack is assisted by poorly written software and utilizes a scrap of code that’s often introduced through a web form field or via a port-listening service, such as that dodgy FTP daemon mentioned previously.

Take a simplistic example. You’ve got a slug of RAM in the box and, on submitting data to a form, that queues up in a memory space, a buffer, where it awaits processing.

Now, imagine someone submits malicious code that’s longer, containing more bits, than the programmer allowed for. Again, the data queues in its buffer but, being too long, it overflows, overwriting the form’s expected command and having itself executed instead.

So what about the worry of swiped access credentials? Again, possibilities abound.

Intercepting data with man-in-the-middle attacks

The MITM is where someone sits between your keystrokes and the server, scouring the data. That could be, for example, a rootkit, a data logger, a network, or a wireless sniffer.

If your data transits unencrypted, in plain text, as is the case with FTP or HTTP and commonly with e-mail, then everything is exposed. That includes login credentials.

Cracking authentication with password attacks

Brute force attacks, on the other hand, run through alphanumeric and special character combinations against a login function, such as for a control panel or the Dashboard, until the password is cracked. They’re helped immensely when the username is known, so there’s a hint not to use that regular old WordPress chestnut, admin.

Brute forcing can be time-consuming, but can also be coordinated between multiple zombies, warp-speeding the process with the combined processing power. Dictionary attacks, meanwhile, throw A-Z word lists against the password and hybrid attacks morph brute force and dictionary techniques to crack naïve keys such as pa55worD.

The many dangers of cross-site scripting (XSS)

XSS crosses bad code—adds it—with an unsecured site. Site users become a secondary target here because when they visit a hacked page, and their browser properly downloads everything as it resolves, they retrieve the bad code to become infected locally.

An in-vogue example is the iframe injection which adds a link that leads to, say, a malicious download on another server. When a visitor duly views the page, downloading it locally, malware and all, the attacker has control over that user’s PC. Lovely.

There’s more. Oh so much more. Books more in fact. There’s too much to mention here, but another classic tactic is to use XSS for cookie stealing.

… All that’s involved here is a code injection to some poor page that reports to a log file on the hacker’s server. Page visitors have their cookies chalked up to the log and have their session hijacked, together with their session privileges. If the user’s logged into webmail, so can the hacker. If it’s online banking, goodbye to your funds. If the user’s a logged-in WordPress administrator, you get the picture.

Assorted threats with cross-site request forgery (CSRF)

This is not the same as XSS, but there are similarities, the main one being that, again, a blameless if poorly built site is crossed with malicious code to cause an effect.

A user logs into your site and, in the regular way, is granted a session cookie. The user surfs some pages, one of them having been decorated with some imaginative code from an attacker which the user’s browser correctly downloads. Because that script said to do something to your site and because the unfortunate user hadn’t logged out of your site, relinquishing the cookie, the action is authorized by the user’s browser.

What may happen to your site, for example, depends on the user’s privileges so could vary from a password change or data theft to a nice new theme effect called digital soup.

 

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