Category: Security

Chris La Nauze – Two Step Authentication with WordPress

How safe is your site from a hack attempt? With the increase in WordPress’ popularity worldwide, the risks increase that your site might become a target of a botnet exploit, a malicious competitor, a hacker, a rogue customer or some other attacker.

What are you doing to stop the most basic and easiest ways to get into your site? The front door (so to speak) of a WordPress site, is by attacking the login page. What steps do you have in place to add extra layers of security to your site to reduce the risk, and thwart an attack on your online asset. There are many ways to harden your site, Chris is covering Two Step Authentication. It’s not the only way to protect your site, but it’s one of the ways, in fact there are some vulnerabilities with this method that you should be aware of.

Chris La Nauze, is no stranger to the Melbourne WordPress Meetup, he’s been contributing to the group for the last couple of years. Chris loves learning about security and hardening his own sites. Chris runs a Web Design business in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne Lanauze Designs.

Here are the slides from the night.

So for many of you, you may have kids, (I don’t, but i’m a heavy internet user with a passion for security).

I get asked all the time about what a parent should use to restrict the exposure of porn and graphic content for their kids.

I run two systems for protecting my friends children, (but they won’t stop someone talking to their kid from another persons internet connection, so you need to do to good old fashion education as well. )

At home setup your internet connection to go through a dns filter, most isp’s have a limited filter, and most home routers now days include some form of parent filter, like blocking certain urls from loading, but in my experience, it hasn’t always worked, if your more concerned, most virus companies have one for filtering phishing, and really bad sites, but they generally don’t filter porn, or social media. A site like https://www.opendns.com/ can do a lot of your heavy lifting at home, it means no matter what device connects to that connection, they will be getting the filtering and protection. If you need a guide on how to set that up properly, use this one, http://www.howtogeek.com/79998/protect-your-kids-online-using-open-dns-2/

Now what about protecting each device, at home, and away from home, how as a parent can you be sure your kids arn’t visiting sites that they shouldn’t be. A service like http://x3watch.com/ is your best bet. They have step by step instructions on how to disable the default browsers in your iphone and android, and use their special browser, that has filtering enabled. You also can setup reports, and alarm notifications for accountability. You can setup more then one accountability partner, whether that’s a parent, or if your teenage/ young adult son or daughter has an addiction problem that needs a friend to keep them in line.

For other great tips, devices and software you can check out this site. http://www.safefamilies.org/SoftwareTools.php

Edit: Digital Business Consultant, Nathan Wrigley from Picture and Word reminded me that most of the problems parents face is what the device can do, rather than what needs to be filtered. Ie a tablet device, is a quick way for your child to pull up any number of apps and games, that can make you immediately broke, or somehow on a email marketing list. He recommended this great app for Android tablets. Kids Place – Parental Control. Thanks Nathan for that valuable suggestion.

Do you have your own tips, or processes, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.