WordPress is very popular platform and also secure but due to its popularity lots of hackers are trying to hack popular website based on WordPress. Besides hackers, there are also some other potential threats such as viruses, bots, and various other threats. To secure WordPress site from hackers, here we look at how this plugin (All In One WP Security & Firewall) helps to alleviate them.
To protect your WordPress based CMS, there are some good plugins are available. All in one WP Security & Firewall Plugin is one of them which is free of cost. All in One WP Security and Firewall is a user-friendly plugin that approaches all the valuable security features that are essential for the WordPress website. The developer of this Plugin has categorized this plugin into “basic”, “intermediate” and “advanced” which one can choose as per security requirements.
The Basic feature is an immediate action that should activate after installing to add a minimum level of security to your website. Whereas the Intermediate and the Advanced features are meant to provide more complex security structure and can stop the functionality of some plugins. So before activating any service of this plugin just ensure that some other plugin will not depend on or use that service.
Key Features of All in One WP Security & Firewall plugin
Here is the list of some major security and firewall features offered by this plugin.
- User Accounts Security
- User Login Security
- Database Security
- File System Security
- .htaccess and wp-config.php File Backup and Restore
- Blacklist Functionality
- Firewall Functionality
- Brute force login attack prevention
- WhoIs Lookup
- Security Scanner
- Comment SPAM Security
- Front-end Text Copy Protection
- Regular updates and additions of new security features
How it works
Dashboard
The Dashboard of this plugin is very intuitive and lets you check your security strength meter, points breakdown as well as basic options and information. You also have tabs for your system info and locked IP address.
General Settings
Second Tab is the General Settings where got the options to disable all the security features or all the firewall features of the plugin with just one click. Also, there are some other tabs which feature the backup and restore your .htaccess and wpconfig.php files of your website.
User Account
Third option or tab is providing the features to increase the security to your username and password. Here you can change the Username and password from simple to a more complicated one. Also under the password section, it gives a visual reference to your password strength and the time some Desktop PC would take to crack your password.
User Login
The Fourth tab from the WP sidebar is User Login that provides the settings to Login Lockdown and Force Logout. When you activate the security options under this category it will secure the forced login attack while the second forces a user to log out after a pre-determined amount of time.
User Registration
User Registration option allows you an ability to approve the new register user manually and also offers a captcha to the registration page.
Database security
Database security option will provide to a backup option of your database and can send the copy of your database to admin via email. Also, it can change the prefix of your default WordPress DB to more complex to increase the security.
File system security
This feature will scan complete file system of your WordPress that includes WP core folders also, the benefit of this feature is, it will highlight any permission settings which are insecure and can put your website at risk. Beside this, you can also disable the ability for people to edit the PHP files via the dashboard.
Blacklist Manager
This Feature gives you the option of banning certain host IP addresses or ranges and also user agents. For blocking people, it adds certain rules in your .htaccess file to secure the first line of defense which denies all access to blacklisted visitors as soon as they hit your hosting server.
Firewall-WP Security
The firewall provides contain options together such as Basic Firewall rule, Additional rule, 6G Blacklist, Internet Bots, Prevent Hotlinks, 404 Detection and custom rules. The 6G Blacklist is updated and improved version of 5G Blacklist. The 6G Blacklist is a simple, flexible blacklist that helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website. Whereas the Internet Bots feature is used to block bots which are impersonating as a Googlebot but actually aren’t. You can also prevent Hotlink to reduce the server load.
Brute force
At Bruteforce page, you can take one major step to prevent your site from getting hacked. You can change the default login page name i.e.www.example.com/ wp-admin, where wp-admin is default login name. The second tab on this page is dedicated to preventing the brute force attack: A Brute Force Attack is when a hacker tries many combinations of usernames and passwords until they succeed in guessing the right combination.
The third tab enables the captcha at the login page, Lost password and on comments. Last two tabs are Login whilst and Honeypot, the Login feature gives you the option of only allowing certain IP addresses or ranges to have access to your WordPress login page.
Honeypot feature allows you to add a special hidden “honeypot” field on the WordPress login page. This will only be visible to robots and not humans.
These are some Basic, Intermediate and Advance feature provided by this free plugin, also there are some Miscellaneous features which are used to get some extra functionality or information for a website such as WHOIS Lookup, Spam Prevention, scanner, and Maintenance.
You can use this plugin without any doubt to secure WordPress site from hackers free of cost. Besides this plugin, you can also add CloudFlare CDN to enhance your security. CloudFlare also has the free plan to secure your WordPress website from Denial-of-service attack (DDoS).
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