With the increasing use of Internet in the world, the data threats are doubling and more severe too. If you are serious about your website, you need to pay attention to WordPress security. In this guide, we share a quick help guide for System Administrators on WordPress site scanning.
Hosting facts says that there are 4 plus billion internet users, out of which 2 billion people use eCommerce websites. In the first quarter of 2019, there are about 1.9 billion websites in the world. Whereas out of these websites WordPress is the most popularly used CMS in the world. Also, the report indicates that around 0.1 million websites are getting hacked every day and WordPress stands at 80%.
Knowing the needs of WordPress security, lots of comprehensive plugins and tools are available. This helps prevent malware infections and data threats. These tools include vulnerability scanners too. If the percentage of hacking increases, preventive measures also increased to high level. Along with various proactive plans on web security, there should be plans for disaster recovery and awareness on upcoming threats.
Need for site Scanning:
This guide can help system administrators to do periodic checks and find out malicious code injections / viruses. When their online / offline tools fail to bring it to their attention or fail in mitigating the infected files.
The WordPress sites are hacked through code injections, database injections, malware infections, backdoor executions, weaker file permissions and passwords, third party plugins and themes. There is an article available in the WordPress Official website about how to harden the WordPress website by improving the database and web security, correcting the file and folder permissions, setting up scanners, firewalls and security plugins, etc.
Therefore below is one method to identify backdoor scripts / malware files in WordPress websites and these backdoor scripts can be injected through, plugins / themes / weaker files. This allows hackers to access your website and execute the processes by updating the files and running OS commands through PHP, Perl and curl files. Nowadays it’s difficult to find these breaches.
Quick site Scanning:
Download Findbot.pl script from https://www.abuseat.org/findbot.pl and place it under /root or your user’s home directory and make sure to change the file permissions to 755. Open this file to. This script attempts to find malicious files / scripts on your machine. In other words it specifically looks for spam bots as well as “suspicious” constructs in various scripting languages. You can restrict the scanning to only PHP and Perl files by updating the line ‘my $scripts =’ in findbot.pl file. As WordPress site mostly uses php executable files, this help to finishes the scanning faster.
You can also place this syntax under a cron job for regular scanning of files and report the results through email. Keep visiting this blog for more Web and server security topics. For any assistance on WordPress site scanning you can Contact us and we’ll take care of the rest.
