Deny direct access to PHP files in wp-content/uploads/
The following PHP function secures your WordPress website by disabling the execution of PHP scripts in wp-content/uploads, on Windows Server IIS web servers. It creates a web.config file for this purpose.
Joomla websites using the Googlemaps plugin for Joomla are actively abused as open proxy for launching Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Even though the Googlemaps plugin vulnerability plugin_googlemap2_proxy.php was released over one and a half (1,5) years ago, I still see these DoS-attacks happening on a regular basis…
Exploit PHP’s mail() function to perform remote code execution, under rare circumstances.
Summer vacation’s over? More and more SQL injection attacks observed
Since a week or so, I notice a huge increase in SQL injection attacks on various websites. Anyone else seeing the same SQL injection attacks lately? This increased SQL injection activity – on various web sites and databases – has the following characteristics:
Read More »Increase in SQL injection attacks How to put a MySQL server to sleep()
MySQL sleep() command injection attacks: how not validating your PHP user input can lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against websites and back-end database servers. Simply by putting “AND sleep(3)” in the address bar… Happy SQL injection!
Learn how to set up website DDoS protection with .htaccess and mod_evasive on Windows Server IIS
Mod_evasive is a module for Apache and Windows Server IIS (using Helicon Ape). It provides protection and evasive action in the event of an HTTP DoS-, DDoS or brute force attack. Detection is performed by creating an internal dynamic hash table of IP Addresses and URIs, and denies an IP address access to a website if it’s requesting the same page more than 10 times a second. This is configurable.
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Remove HTTP response headers in Windows Server IIS 10 and ASP.NET
Windows Server IIS loves to tell the world that a website runs on IIS. It does so with the Server header in the HTTP response, as shown below. In this post I’ll show you how to remove response server headers in IIS. You don’t want to give hackers too much information about your servers, heh? ;-).
Read More »Remove IIS Server version HTTP Response Header
prettyPhoto DOM based XSS on Saotn.org… This evening, after tweeting about preventing cross site scripting vulnerabilities, I received a reply from Olivier Beg. His reply to my tweet contained an image, as you can see above. He alerted me that Saotn.org was vulnerable to a DOM based XSS vulnerability, hidden in prettyPhoto used by my WordPress theme. Whoops! So, I had work to do! But, what is prettyPhoto and what exactly is a DOM based XSS?
Read More »prettyPhoto DOM based XSS Some web scripting languages, such as classic ASP, don’t have native string hashing functions – like MD5 or SHA1. This makes it quite difficult to hash or encrypt user supplied input, and to perform string comparison to compare hashes. Let’s make MySQL do the string comparison and hash calculations for us!
Read More »How to compare MD5 and SHA1 hashes in MySQL How to check the file type in PHP and secure file uploads: it is important to validate MIME types in PHP. Especially of files uploaded through an upload form to your website. Using PHP, the best way to validate MIME types is with the PHP extension Fileinfo. Any other method might not be as good or secure as you might think…
Read More »Validate MIME types with PHP Fileinfo The less spammers hit your WordPress blog, the better your blog performs, is one of my opinions. A second is, the less unnecessary plugins you use on your WordPress blog, the better. So, a little while ago I decided to remove plugins like Stop Spammer Registration Plugin and do its work myself. Here is why & how:
Read More »Block WordPress comment spammers manually Today one of our clients received a System.Net.WebException error on a newly deployed ASP.NET web application. Part of the exception was: “System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.“. Here is how we resolved that issue.
Read More »Fix "Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel" error HD Moore wrote an excellent article on penetration testing IPMI and BMC’s. The article is based on various work of Dan Farmer and provides Metasploit penetration testing examples.
Read More »A Penetration Tester’s Guide to IPMI and BMCs Send authenticated SMTP (auth-SMTP) over a TLS encrypted connection. If you want to send email securely from your website, this post is for you! In this post I’ll provide some script examples for ASP, PHP, and ASP.NET (C# / VB.Net) that you can easily integrate in your website.
Read More »How to send authenticated SMTP over a TLS encrypted connection, in PHP, ASP and ASP.NET? The following was posted to the Web Security Mailinglist: Unauthorized Access: Bypassing PHP strcmp(). A way to bypass PHP’s strcmp() binary safe string comparison function.