NinjaFirewall (WP Edition) – Advanced Security Plugin and Firewall vs SAR One Click Security

A true Web Application Firewall NinjaFirewall (WP Edition) is a true Web Application Firewall. Although it can be installed and configured just like a plugin, it is a stand-alone firewall that stands in front of WordPress. It allows any blog administrator to benefit from very advanced and powerful security features that usually aren’t available at the WordPress level, but only in security applications such as the Apache ModSecurity module or the PHP Suhosin extension. NinjaFirewall requires at least PHP 7.1, MySQLi extension and is only compatible with Unix-like OS (Linux, BSD). It is not compatible with Microsoft Windows. NinjaFirewall can hook, scan, sanitise or reject any HTTP/HTTPS request sent to a PHP script before it reaches WordPress or any of its plugins. All scripts located inside the blog installation directories and sub-directories will be protected, including those that aren’t part of the WordPress package. Even encoded PHP scripts, hackers shell scripts and backdoors will be filtered by NinjaFirewall. Powerful filtering engine NinjaFirewall includes the most powerful filtering engine available in a WordPress plugin. Its most important feature is its ability to normalize and transform data from incoming HTTP requests which allows it to detect Web Application Firewall evasion techniques and obfuscation tactics used by hackers, as well as to support and decode a large set of encodings. See our blog for a full description: An introduction to NinjaFirewall filtering engine. Fastest and most efficient brute-force attack protection for WordPress By processing incoming HTTP requests before your blog and any of its plugins, NinjaFirewall is the only plugin for WordPress able to protect it against very large brute-force attacks, including distributed attacks coming from several thousands of different IPs. See our benchmarks and stress-tests: Brute-force attack detection plugins comparison The protection applies to the wp-login.php script but can be extended to the xmlrpc.php one. The incident can also be written to the server AUTH log, which can be useful to the system administrator for monitoring purposes or banning IPs at the server level (e.g., Fail2ban). Real-time detection File Guard real-time detection is a totally unique feature provided by NinjaFirewall: it can detect, in real-time, any access to a PHP file that was recently modified or created, and alert you about this. If a hacker uploaded a shell script to your site (or injected a backdoor into an already existing file) and tried to directly access that file using his browser or a script, NinjaFirewall would hook the HTTP request and immediately detect that the file was recently modified or created. It would send you an alert with all details (script name, IP, request, date and time). File integrity monitoring File Check lets you perform file integrity monitoring by scanning your website hourly, twicedaily or daily. Any modification made to a file will be detected: file content, file permissions, file ownership, timestamp as well as file creation and deletion. Watch your website traffic in real time Live Log lets you watch your website traffic in real time. It displays connections in a format similar to the one used by the tail -f Unix command. Because it communicates directly with the firewall, i.e., without loading WordPress, Live Log is fast, lightweight and it will not affect your server load, even if you set its refresh rate to the lowest value. Event Notifications NinjaFirewall can alert you by email on specific events triggered within your blog. Some of those alerts are enabled by default and it is highly recommended to keep them enabled. It is not unusual for a hacker, after breaking into your WordPress admin console, to install or just to upload a backdoored plugin or theme in order to take full control of your website. NinjaFirewall can also attach a PHP backtrace to important notifications. Monitored events: Administrator login. Modification of any administrator account in the database. Plugins upload, installation, (de)activation, update, deletion. Themes upload, installation, activation, deletion. WordPress update. Pending security update in your plugins and themes. Stay protected against the latest WordPress security vulnerabilities To get the most efficient protection, NinjaFirewall can automatically update its security rules daily, twice daily or even hourly. Each time a new vulnerability is found in WordPress or one of its plugins/themes, a new set of security rules will be made available to protect your blog immediately. Strong Privacy Unlike a Cloud Web Application Firewall, or Cloud WAF, NinjaFirewall works and filters the traffic on your own server and infrastructure. That means that your sensitive data (contact form messages, customers credit card number, login credentials etc) remains on your server and is not routed through a third-party company’s servers, which could pose unnecessary risks (e.g., decryption of your HTTPS traffic in order to inspect it, employees accessing your data or logs in plain text, theft of private information, man-in-the-middle attack etc). Your website can run NinjaFirewall and be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). See our blog for more details. IPv6 compatibility IPv6 compatibility is a mandatory feature for a security plugin: if it supports only IPv4, hackers can easily bypass the plugin by using an IPv6. NinjaFirewall natively supports IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, for both public and private addresses. Multi-site support NinjaFirewall is multi-site compatible. It will protect all sites from your network and its configuration interface will be accessible only to the Super Admin from the network main site. Possibility to prepend your own PHP code to the firewall You can prepend your own PHP code to the firewall with the help of an optional distributed configuration file. It will be processed before WordPress and all its plugins are loaded. This is a very powerful feature, and there is almost no limit to what you can do: add your own security rules, manipulate HTTP requests, variables etc. Low Footprint Firewall NinjaFirewall is very fast, optimised, compact, and requires very low system resource. See for yourself: download and install the Code Profiler plugin and compare NinjaFirewall’s performance with other security plugins. Non-Intrusive User Interface NinjaFirewall looks and feels like a built-in WordPress feature. It does not contain intrusive banners, warnings or flashy colors. It uses the WordPress simple and clean interface and is also smartphone-friendly. Contextual Help Each NinjaFirewall menu page has a contextual help screen with useful information about how to use and configure it. If you need help, click on the Help menu tab located in the upper right corner of each page in your admin panel. Need more security ? Check out our new supercharged edition: NinjaFirewall WP+ Edition Unix shared memory use for inter-process communication and blazing fast performances. IP-based Access Control. Role-based Access Control. Country-based Access Control via geolocation. URL-based Access Control. Bot-based Access Control. Import/Export the configuration from WP-CLI. Centralized Logging. Antispam for comment and user regisration forms. Rate limiting option to block aggressive bots, crawlers, web scrapers and HTTP attacks. Response body filter to scan the output of the HTML page right before it is sent to your visitors browser. Better File uploads management. Better logs management. Syslog logging. Learn more about the WP+ Edition unique features. Compare the WP and WP+ Editions. Requirements WordPress 4.9+ Admin/Superadmin with manage_options + unfiltered_html capabilities. PHP 7.1+ MySQL or MariaDB with MySQLi extension Apache / Nginx / LiteSpeed / Openlitespeed compatible Unix-like operating systems only (Linux, BSD etc). NinjaFirewall is NOT compatible with Microsoft Windows.

There’s a lot of WordPress security plugins with many many options and pages to setup. And that is fine if you know what to do. But most of the times, you don’t need so much or simply you’re not sure about what to set or not. This plugin adds some extra security to your WordPress with only one click. No options page, just activate it! Features Like many other security plugins SAR One Click Security adds well known .htaccess rules, but only the ones probed to be safe to use in almost any type of site (including WooCommerce stores), to protect your WordPress from common attacks. This allows you to have a safer WordPress without worries about what protection you should be using. Turn off ServerSignature directive, that may leak information about your web server. Turn off directory listing, avoiding bad configured hostings to leak your files. Blocks public access (from web) to following files that may leak information about your WordPress install: .htaccess, license.txt, readme.html, wp-config.php, wp-config-sample.php, install.php Blocks access to wp-login.php to dummy bots trying to register in WordPress sites that have registration disabled. Blocks requests looking for timthumb.php, reducing server load caused by bots trying to find it. (*) Blocks TRACE and TRACK request methods, preventing XST attacks. Blocks direct posting to wp-comments-post.php (most spammers do this) and access with blank User Agent, reducing spam comments a lot and also server load. Blocks direct access to PHP files in wp-content directory (this includes subdirectories like plugins or themes). Protecting you from a huge number of 0day exploits. Blocks direct POST to wp-login.php and access with blank User Agent, preventing most brute-force attacks and reducing server load. Blocks access to .txt files under any plugin/theme directory to prevent scans for installed plugins/themes. Blocks any query string trying to get a copy of the wp-config.php file. Blocks gf_page=upload query string argument, this was deprecated in Gravity Forms on May 2015, if your copy of Gravity Forms still uses it, update now! Removes version information from page headers. This includes not only the page header (html or xhtml) but also feed headers (rss, rss2, atom, rdf) and opml comments. Only the version number is removed, not the entire generator information. (*) If your theme uses TimThumb, you can disable that blocking rule, check FAQ before installing the plugin to see how. Requirements WordPress 3.9.2 or higher. (Works with WordPress network/multisite installation). Apache 2.4.x web server It has been tested in many servers including large providers like HostGator, Godaddy and 1&1 with optimal results, and it will work fine in any decent hosting service (that allows you to set options from .htaccess files). Anyway, if you get any problem after activating the plugin, check FAQ for instructions on how to manually uninstall it. If you’re not sure of which server is your hosting company using or if they allow to use custom .htaccess rules, I would recommend you to contact with your host support before installing the plugin. Usage To apply above mentioned security rules simply install and activate the plugin, no options page, no user setup! If you need to remove the security rules for some reason, simply deactivate the plugin. If you want to add them again, activate the plugin again, that easy 😉 And remember, if your theme uses TimThumb, check FAQ before installing the plugin.