Apocalypse Meow vs Server Security Scan

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like: Brute-force login-in protection; Customizable password strength requirements; XML-RPC access controls; Account access alerts; Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans); User enumeration prevention; Registration SPAM protection; Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult; Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers; Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information. Knowledge is power! Requirements Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires: WordPress 4.4+. PHP 7.4 or later. PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre. CREATE and DROP MySQL grants. Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported). Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its End of Life. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂 Log Monitoring Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like Fail2Ban or OSSEC to ban users via the firewall. Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to wp-login.php. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools. If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the die() option, requests for ?author=X will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked. Privacy Policy When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors. This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties. Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days. Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)

♦ Check your server’s overall security ♦ Detect unsafe PHP settings ♦ Detect unsafe PHP functions ♦ Check for security modules ♦ Detect unwanted write permissions ♦ Detect all errors and error levels Server Security Scan identifies possible vulnerabilities and loopholes in your sever by inspecting various PHP configurations and settings, checking write permissions of directories, checking for presence of security modules and by detecting the presence of any unsafe PHP functions. Thus it helps to protect your server from various possible web site hacks such as variable injection, code injection and SQL injection etc. Unsafe PHP configuration scan Server Security Scan checks for certain PHP configurations in your server to identify whether they are configured safely so as to safeguard your server from hackers. The scanner suggests possible issues of wrongly configuring these settings as well as the criticality level of misconfiguring these settings. Unsafe PHP function scan Hackers may misuse some of the PHP functions which you do not use in your applications. Often these functions might be enabled by default in most of the servers. The Server Security Scanner detects whether such functions are enabled in your server and suggests the criticality level and issues related to those functions. Directory permission scan It is unsafe to leave your web accessible directories with write permission. The Server Security Scanner detects all writable folder permissions and reports them. Security module scan There are certain PHP extensions which can be used to enhance the security of your PHP installation. The Server Security Scan detects whther such modules are installed on your server and reprts the same. The Server Security Scan detects various possiblities of hacking your server and reports them. The items are reported with criticality of each of the detection. You may contact your host to get the issues rectified if you are not familiar with updating server configurations. About Server Security Scan is developed and maintained by wordpressutils. More Information Troubleshooting Please read the FAQ first if you are having problems. Requirements WordPress 2.8+ PHP 5+