Wordpress

Real time detection and automated root cause analysis of web malware, exploits and backdoors with Splunk. Part 1, Architecture.

detecting_web_malwareIn this article I’ll demonstrate step by step how to setup Splunk analytics to detect successful known and unknown malware attacks on web hosting systems in real time.

In addition the same solution will include instructions to deploy fully automated investigative analytics to discover the origins of attackers (IP addresses) as well as any modifications within the file system.

This information is essential to discover and immediately eliminate all possible backdoors and exploits that attacker tried to plant.

Real time alerts will be delivered via email to system administrator as soon as attack occurs. The same information will be available via Splunk web interface for further analysis. (more…)

Before buying membership site software – ask these questions to every vendor

Building online membership site business is an exciting step on the road to build our own source of residual income.

We all have talents, we all love and know to do certain things better than anyone else. We all know how to solve certain problems that others would love to learn from us. Taking time to put our skills, experience, passion and knowledge on the web and having a chance to monetize it brings triple excitement:

  1. You do something more about what you love.
  2. You share what you love to do with other people and helping them to solve their problems.
  3. You can make money doing what you love.

One way to monetize your skills and experience is to build a site  and share your skills and experience in form of writings, posts, helpful articles, downloadable ebooks, text, video and audio tutorials or in any other kind of “digital” format. Idea is to share your talents with other people, helping them to solve their problems and making money along the way by charging for information access.
Today on internet people are happily paying for useful practical information.

Once you decide to take a step and start building your online membership business the question is how to proceed? (more…)

WordPress Membership Plugin – MemberWing. And it’s free!

If you want to convert your wordpress blog into membership site and shy spending hundreds of dollars upfront – keep reading! 🙂

The new free wordpress membership plugin – MemberWing allows to convert your existing blog into membership site without any changes or re-designs.

MemberWing was built with Search Engine Optimization and speed in mind.

By inserting small text marker “{+++}” inside any article (old or new) – the content of it will become “protected” and available only to registered premium members. Simply put – anything that was before the marker – is visible for everyone – so put your teasers here. Anything after the “{+++}” marker will only be visible to users who are “Gold” or “Platinum” members. This is great feature that allows search engines to index and rank free text “teasers” part of your blog/website. Other plugins and multi-hundred dollars membership software packages does not have this very useful feature. They just lock site completely leaving you on your own with zero chance for organic rankings.

Once activated, plugin created 4 separate group members – Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. So you may (if wanted to) have 4 classes of contents and charge fees accordingly to access each class of contents. The way you mark contents of your articles for each group is the same simple one – via markers that separate free teasers from premium “juicy” part. {+} – Bronze members, {++} – Bronze and Silver members, {+++} – Bronze, Silver and Gold members, etc..

Membership plugin MemberWing supports latest version of self-hosted WordPress 2.6+ and works on any hosted account that allows wordpress installations.

I’ve installed it here – and protected this article 🙂

Here’s how your protected article will look like, when viewed by non-premium member:

{+++}

Yes.

How to reboot/reset/restart iPhone or iPod touch

WordPress folks recently released free application that allow you to manage your WordPress blog directly from iPhone or iPod touch. This free neat app lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It supports WordPress 2.5.1 and higher as well as WordPress MU.

I downloaded it but experienced a problem where application would just close by itself right after starting up. Sincerely – it started to happen after I also downloaded a few games as well. Not sure whether different apps started to conflict with each other or iPod developed some sort of Windows-ish need-to-be-rebooted-often-to-work-properly syndrome.

So to fix it I removed a few games and performed the following “soft reboot” procedure:

Press and hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button (top edge of your device) simultaneously for a few seconds. The iPhone/iPod’s display will clear. Then the Apple logo appears. In a few more seconds the whole system gets back to normal. Reboot/restart is done.

After that my new WordPress App worked properly.

How to prevent wordpress from messing up with your rich editing tags

After spending countless hours fighting with wordpress changing my tags and text formatting in it’s rich text editor I finally decided to create a tiny little cute plugin that makes wordpress to leave alone my HTML formatting, tags and line breaks.

Essentially the source code of the whole thing is this:

function myautop ($text) { return $text; }
function mytext  ($text) { return $text; }
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'myautop');
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wptexturize');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'mytext');

You may download actual plugin from the link below. Just unzip, copy it into ./plugins directory, activate and enjoy.

Note: to fix another big annoyance with WordPress eliminating line breaks – this is what I use to “create” line breaks that WordPress doesn’t kill. In HTML mode insert this code:

<div style="margin:2em;"><span style="display:none;">-</span></div>

Advantage of this method is that you can regulate size of your “custom line break” by changing value in “margin” CSS tag.

Bonus TIP:
Actually I just found a better way to keep linebreaks: Advanced TinyMCE plugin seems to add lot more features to TinyMCE editor as well as has an option to stop WordPress’s messing up with line breaks.

Download: WP-AllowTags
Wordpress Plugin that allows inserting tags

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