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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 these xmlrpc.php attacks, but still being able to use (some of) its functionality like Jetpack? This post gives you some insight.

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RewriteProxy with .htaccess in IIS

Rewrite and proxy HTTP requests in IIS. In my case scenario, I had to proxy requests on 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.

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Secure WordPress uploads folder, disable PHP execution

The following PHP function will disable the execution of PHP scripts in WordPress’ wp-content/uploads, on IIS web servers. Securing the WordPress uploads folder is important. In many hacked WordPress sites, a PHP backdoor is found within the WP_CONTENT_DIR/uploads directory. Often because this is the location where uploads are placed automatically. From the backdoor within wp-content/uploads other backdoors are uploaded to various locations, and scripts are injected with malware.

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Remove IIS Server version HTTP Response Header

How to remove HTTP response headers in IIS 7, 7.5, 8.0, 8.5, 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? ;-).

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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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"The length of the URL for this request exceeds the configured maxUrlLength value"

The length of the URL for this request exceeds the configured maxUrlLength value is an IIS error telling you the length of the given URL exceeds a limit. IIS default maximum length for a URL is defined by the HttpRuntimeSection.MaxUrlLength property. Its value is 260 characters. This may cause problems with longer than configured maxUrlLength URL’s, and here is how to resolve this issue…

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