WordPress

prettyPhoto DOM based XSS

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?

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Install WordPress plugins without WP-admin access

Install WordPress plugins without admin access, and automate your WordPress customization and plugin installation. WordPress has a little drop-in plugin option available in the form of /wp-content/install.php. This install.php file is not present at default, but when created it can be used to install plugins without wp-admin access. This might come in handy for unattended WordPress installations, customization, and so on.

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Set or remove the read-only attribute assigned to files with PHP chmod

Chmod.php, change file attributes with PHP, to make files read only or normally accessible on Windows IIS servers. Sometimes you need chmod to make files read only on your website, or make them normally accessible in case they already are read only. For instance Drupal’s settings.php configuration file, or WordPress Contact Form 7 temporary captcha files, are examples of read-only files.

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Don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, fix your PHP configuration

An often heard solution to PHP cURL errors with SSL is to turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER. Please don’t turn off CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, but fix your PHP config instead. This article provides you two solutions to solve CA certificate validation errors with PHP cURL and OpenSSL. For system administrators and end-users.

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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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