In this tutorial, we will describe the necessary steps to configure two-factor authentication (2FA) using Google authenticator on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS. This application includes implementations of one-time passcode generators for several mobile platforms. This method adds another layer of protection to your server adding an extra step to the basic login procedure.
We’ll show you, how to secure LEMP stack. LEMP, it stands for Linux, (EngineX) NGINX, MariaDB (or MySQL) and PHP. Due to its flexibility and simplicity, NGINX slowly takes over the Internet. In this tutorial, we will attempt, through examples of bad and good practices, to go through the steps of properly securing your Linux web server. So what is the term Security? Often you can hear the IT Engineers saying “Our network is secure” or “Our servers are secure” however, those sentences although widely used are technically not correct, as in many books and publications you can find that Security as a term is not a static value, but rather a degree. From Wikipedia the definition is:
“Security is the degree of resistance to, or protection from harm. It applies to any vulnerable and/or valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, item, nation, or organization.”
In terms of servers or applications, one should always be aware that the more secure their server or application is, the less accessible it becomes (it is harder to be accessed).
Of course, the best example for this is the proverb:
“The most secure server is the one that is switched off.”.
As ridiculous as it may sound, this is occasionally practiced by some organizations today, where their most secure servers are kept offline and/or in totally closed networks and are powered on only when they need to be.
We’ll show you, How to Secure a WordPress Site. WordPress is by far the most popular blogging platform today. Being as popular as it is, it comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. The very fact that almost everybody uses it, makes it more prone to vulnerabilities. WordPress developers are doing a great job of fixing and patching the framework as new flaws are discovered, but that doesn’t mean that you can simply install and forget your installation. In this post, we will provide some of the most common ways of securing and strengthening a WordPress site. Securing a WordPress site is fairly easy task, just carefully follow this tutorial bellow.
Apache is the most popular and most used web server in the world, and it is the first web server used to serve more than 100 million websites around the world. Apache is know to be very secure web server, but in this article we will explain few basic configuration changes to make Apache even more secure on a CentOS VPS.
Nikto is a Perl based, open source vulnerability tool which performs wide range of tests against web servers for thousands of vulnerabilities
, outdated versions and other known issues. Since Nikto is Perl based, it can run on all operating systems with Perl installed. In this tutorial we will show you how to install and use Nikto on an Ubuntu VPS. Its installation is very easy and fast.
SSHGuard is very useful monitoring tool for preventing brute force attacks. SSHGuard reads log messages from standard input and determines malicious activities. If an attack is detected, the attacking IP address is immediately blocked in the firewall. In this article we will guide you through the steps of installing SSHGuard on an Ubuntu VPS and protecting your server against brute-force attacks.
Keeping your WordPress installation, plugins and themes up to date is very important. You have to continually update WordPress immediately after a new version is released. The new versions will bring you new features, bug fixes, stability improvements and the most important – security fixes. If you do not update your WordPress website it is very likely that your website will be hacked at some point. In this case you can lose your website content, your customers, lose your Google ranking, your website can be defaced, your server can be used for spamming, and many more. So, updating WordPress should be on the top of your list when it comes to the security of your Linux virtual server.
Suhosin is an advanced protection system for scripts and the PHP core itself. It is an open source PHP patch used for protecting the users and servers against numerous vulnerabilities and security flaws in the PHP basaed applications including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc…
In this article we will guide you through the simple and fast process of installing Suhosin from source on a Linux VPS.