Recently I installed a very useful plugin on most of my WordPress sites called Wordfence. Wordfence offers both a free and a paid version. The free version is quite robust, although the paid version does unlock a number of useful features. Both the free and the paid version do a nice job at blocking the most common types of hacking attempts and, if you wish, the plugin will email you when someone tries to penetrate your site.
The Wordfence emails are interesting in that they reveal what hackers are trying to do. In my case, I previously maintained dozens of WordPress installs on the same IP address (not a good idea, and I have fixed this). There are numerous tools out there that anyone can use to identify all web sites – WordPress or otherwise – on any IP address, so if you own or manage multiple sites and use the same login name and password, once one site is penetrated, they could all be at risk. [Read more…] about Hardening Your WordPress Install
