HackRepair.com’s Bad Bots .htaccess in web.config for IIS

Jim Walker from HackRepair.com posted a 2016 version of his Bad Bots .htaccess on Pastebin. I offered Jim to translate his Bad Bots .htaccess to web.config, to be used with Windows Server IIS. And here it is, learn to protect your WordPress website with this web.config file!

My WordPress web.config

Do you host your WordPress website on Windows Server IIS? And are you having trouble with your web.config? I often receive questions about how to use a web.config file in WordPress on Windows Server, and which settings are important for a WordPress site. Maybe it’s because I’m a WordPress on IIS enthusiast, so here is my web.config for your convenience (really, it’s not that special).

WordPress 3.5 on IIS 8.0 is unable to save a web.config file

This website Saotn.org is hosted on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8.0 with WordPress for a few months now, and everything is running very smooth. And I would never hit this bug because I don’t need to change my permalinks structure, or save any other plugin setting which would want write to a web.config file. One of my colleagues on the other hand, just moved his website to one of our IIS 8.0 web servers and he noticed he couldn’t save his Permalinks structure in the IIS web.config file. This can be pretty annoying 😉 Quick fix attached…

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Convert .htaccess to web.config

This post describes some of the IIS URL Rewrite equivalents of commonly used Apache .htaccess settings. This is useful when you want to convert your .htaccess to web.config. The second part of this post outlines how to use Internet Information Services Manager to import and convert .htaccess to web.config.

11+ Tips to optimize Umbraco CMS

Umbraco is a popular, ASP.NET powered, content management system (CMS). Even though it performs pretty well, here are 11+ tips to optimize the performance of Umbraco powered websites on IIS.

How to: Protect WordPress from brute-force XML-RPC attacks

The WordPress XML-RPC API has been under attack for many years now. Back in August 2014, WordPress released version 3.9.2, fixing a possible denial of service issue in PHP’s XML processing. There are brute-force amplification attacks, reported by Sucuri, and so on. So, how do you protect WordPress from xmlrpc.php attacks, but still being able to use (some of) its functionality like Jetpack? This post gives you some insight.

Tips to speed up WordPress, serve gzip compressed static HTML files

Who said WordPress is slow on Windows Server IIS? Gzip compress and serve WP-Super-Cache or Cache Enabler static HTML files, to supercharge your WordPress blog. Here is how to serve gzip compressed HTML files through Windows Server IIS: create smaller, compressed, static HTML files, that are downloaded faster. This works with WP-Super-Cache and Cache Enabler on IIS!

SSL in WordPress: how to move WordPress to HTTPS? The definitive guide

Having an SSL certificate in your WordPress is the de-facto standard nowadays, did you know that? Google ranks sites having HTTPS higher in their SERP. But in WordPress, how do you configure an SSL certificate and HTTPS URL? You’ll learn the important steps to move WordPress from http to https in this post.

Ghost on IIS with HTTPS, how to resolve a “Too many redirects” error

When you use iisnode to host the Node.js blogging software Ghost on your IIS web server, and you set up an SSL certificate for your Ghost website, you may run into too many redirect issues when changing Ghost’s config.js file. This happend to me yesterday, and here is the solution.

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IIS URL Rewrite “Rewrite Module error: Expression contains a repeat expression”

How to fix the URL Rewrite Module error “Rewrite error: Expression contains a repeat expression” on Windows Server IIS.

Critical 0-day vulnerability in Joomla patched, update to 3.4.6 now!

The Joomla security team have just released a new version of Joomla to patch a critical remote command execution vulnerability that affects all versions from 1.5 to 3.4. This is a serious vulnerability that can be easily exploited and is already in the wild.

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PowerShell return value, exit code, or ErrorLevel equivalent

Here is how you can verify whether an external command in PowerShell was executed successfully or not by its errorlevel. Simply by verifying PowerShell’s return value, or exit code…

RewriteProxy with .htaccess in IIS

Rewrite and proxy HTTP requests in IIS using a .htaccess

In my case scenario, I had to proxy requests in IIS, because a website was moved from web server A to B, and the DNS wasn’t updated yet. All HTTP requests for the moved website are handled in IIS’ Default Web Site; that’s the wildcard host, and the original host no longer existed there. We needed to match our website and proxy those requests to the new IIS web server. This can either be done using a proxy with URL Rewrite, IIS Application Request Routing (ARR), or a .htaccess file handled by Helicon Ape.

Add a delay to your WordPress login form

It is important to protect your WordPress website from brute-force attacks, and various security plugins exist in doing so. For the purpose of this article, I modified the WordPress Login Delay plugin with a fixed delay of three seconds for my wp-login.php page. This provides you with an easy to use method of protecting your WordPress login form (but do read the caveats!).

How to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) on IIS

Set up HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) in Windows Server IIS. Scott Hanselman wrote a great post on how to enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) on IIS web servers, and here is some more technical information about HSTS in IIS (and other security headers)…