You are likely familiar with WordPress, if not well – interesting 😉 anyhow, you may also have heard about the recent attacks on wordpress blogs by a worm like virus/malware? Attacks on WordPress installations is not something new, it has always been there as it’s such a popular platform however time has revealed some not so smart features with wordpress security, one thing is that you can try to log in as many times as you like without any action being taken – hence there is nothing to stop a brute force attack on your wordpress installation’s login!?
Well Wordfence to the rescue, a simple plugin you install on your wordpress installation that all of a sudden offers you a ton of cool security features, I will just mention a few here – for the complete listing visit their website..
Features;
- Login limiter – limit how many incorrect passwords/usernames are accepted
- Site and theme scanner – scan your wordpress blog for changes
- Block unwanted IP’s from accessing your site
- Manage crawlers (search engine index bots)
- and many many many more cool features
Now a thing like that must cost a fortune you say!? well no, there is a TOTALLY FREE version with basic functionality (enough for most I would say) and the deluxe version which cost a bit.
Now after adding this you should also add Two Factor Authentication, eg using “WordPress Google Authenticator Plugin” – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-authenticator/screenshots/ Or one of the other TwoFactor authentication solutions out there.
So, what are you waiting for 🙂 protect your WordPress blog now 🙂One of the sentences we remember from many sci-fi films and series are “fire phasers”, and along comes a bright laser beam that obliorates the enemy.
Well there has been some Military implementations of lasers to planes etc. where attempts have been made to target missiles etc. however none very spectacular or portable. Today however I read about something really cool, a somewhat portable laser that was capable of;
1. Cutting a matal pole at 1 km distance
2. Tracking and shooting down several drones at 2 km distance (flying at more than 50 meters per second)
3. Detecting tracking and shooting down a “Falling solid object” 82mm in diameter (mimicing a motar round)
It would appear that “Fire Phasers” will not be restricted to Sci-Fi movies in the future, I am looking forward to owning my own ray-gun 😀
For more information refer to the link below to the press release regarding the Rheinmetall’s HEL weapon.
In the good old days you could install SUS on your “home” server and have your own Windows update repository, however after WSUS version “whatnot” the requirements for WSUS has by far outgrown what I wish to allocate on my home/test rig.. Hell I only have 3 machines and a few servers anyhow….
Never the less, when installing new test VM’s etc it would be nice to avoid all the patching since SP1 :-/ well, now you can 🙂
Martin over at Ghacks.net has reviewed an excellent utility that will do JUST that 🙂
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/01/03/windows-offline-update-8-0-released/
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/25/wsus-windows-offline-update-updated/
Further uses is as he describe that you can download all patches for an OS (pt. Win 7 = 1.8GB since SP1) and put it on a stick so you can patch your friends and family’s machines with minimal Internet impact.
For now I have installed the thing and tried downloading patches for Windows 7, it seemed to work flawlessly – but I will try to do some install testing and see how this works out. Looks solid enough though.
Project web site;