Important Security Fix for WordPress
A couple of weeks ago Jeff Starr of Perishable Press came with the post "Important Security Fix for WordPress".
Jeff's server had crashed and all of a sudden his entire website was wide open for any hostile take-over, because people visiting his site were seeing the install.php screen of WordPress!
This is a much overlooked issue and there are 3 fixes available to make your WordPress installation a lot safer:
1. delete the wp-admin/install.php file entirely
2. prevent access to your install.php file by adding this code to your .htaccess file:
# PROTECT install.php
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
Satisfy all
3. rename the install.php file into something like install-disabled.php; then create a new install.php file to which you add the following code:
<?php // install.php replacement page: http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/05/05/important-security-fix-for-wordpress/ ?>
<?php header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"); ?>
<?php header("Status 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"); ?>
<?php header("Retry-After 3600"); // 60 minutes ?>
<?php mail("your@email.com", "Database Error", "There is a problem with the database!"); ?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Error Establishing Database Connection</title>
</head>
<body>
<img src="images/wordpress-logo.png" />
<h1>Error Establishing Database Connection</h1>
<p>We are currently experiencing database issues. Please check back shortly. Thank you.</p>
</body>
</html>
Once this new file is uploaded into the wp-admin folder and your database become unavailable, the visitor will see a static page instead of the WordPress 5 minute install screen.
Apart from showing the static page, you will also receive an email to inform you that your database is experiencing problems.
So which of the 3 solutions you choose, the sooner you fix this, the better!
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