Comments on: How to protect WordPress blog from hackers

By: Kamrul

Kamrul — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:12:16 +0000

Cheers Mike for the tip, that Jail new for me. I was familiar with Chroot though, used it in several occasion. Have to look into that Jail.

Virtual filesystem becoming increasingly popular and necessary every minute.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:25:59 +0000

Thanks Kamrul - I should have been a little clearer by writing a “FreeBSD Jail” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail) or on other flavours of Unix a chroot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot).

Chroot and Jail are not the exact same thing.

A chroot setup creates a virtual filesystem. For example if your website was running in /var/www/segala and you have chrooted the web server to /segala then the web server program (and any programs run by the webserver ) think that /segala is the top level directory on your filesystem.

A Jail is more powerful and can be used to create virtual machines that are kept separate from each other.

By: Kamrul

Kamrul — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 03:27:56 +0000

Good one Mike, though I won’t exactly call it a jail  perhaps secured facility sounds better.

PHP’s include is just one of the many ways to do that. But first of all we need awareness and full understanding of file permission

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:59:02 +0000

Also if you can:

- Have your webserver and database running in a chroot / jail. Then even if someone gets into your server they face a significant barrier to doing more damage.

- The ownership of files on the webserver and the process the webserver runs on should be different. Also makes its harder for a hacker to do more damage even if they do break in.