AntiVirus And AntiSpamBee Plugins For WordPress

Everton | Jun 19, 2009 | Comments


wpantivirusLast week my server was attacked by a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for about 5 days, which took my sites down for about 4 hours.  My host liquidweb responded brilliantly and although they couldn’t stop the attack, they tweaked my server so that it could handle excess load from the attack.

The incident made me think long and hard about my site security.  One of the services the team I manage for my ‘day job’ is an online backup service, and we are also doing penetration tests and putting in place disaster recovery plans.  I decided that I needed to put a disaster recovery plan in place for my online ‘night job’.   Losing all of my hard work over the last 4 years would be absolutely disastrous, as well as the potential loss of income which initially started as extra pocket money, but which I now rely on.

As part of my security review, I’ve been looking at my WordPress installations and the plugins used.  One plugin that I’ve added to my site as a result is the AntiVirus WordPress Plugin.  This plugin scans your WordPress blog daily viruses, worms and malware that are designed for WordPress.  If the WordPress AntiVirus plugin sees any attacks it sends an instant email to the site admin.

Another plugin from the same author that I’m not using, but my business partner Martin is, is the AntispamBee WordPress plugin.  This offers a viable alternative to Akismet for anti-spam protection.   I haven’t tried it myself as I’m quite happy with Akismet and I prefer it to other solutions as the processing isn’t done on my server.  It doesn’t seem to create many false positives which is my prime concern, but I can’t really tell as I don’t check my spam folder anymore as there are too many comments in there.

What steps have you taken to protect your blog?


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About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.

  • I personally think that the most important part of any disaster recovery strategy are regular backups. If everything else fails then you still got the backups to restore the sites.

    I really like the idea of the antivirus plugin to scan the template files for signs of malicious content especially the function to send out an email message when a possible infection is discovered.

    Antispam Bee works pretty well, as good as Akismet I would say. While you might be right that you save a bit of resources as Akismet processes the comments and pings on their server you do loose a bit because of the connections that have to be established. And it is also better for the privacy of your users as no data is being submitted to third party servers.
  • Guys - I'm just getting my own blog up and running. I work for a cloud backup company (www.elephantdrive.com/ray) and feel that my computer is backed up - my blog is on WorPress's site - do I need to do more?

    Plug ins - can't us 'em until I move the blog to a hosted site, right? Please recommend reasonably priced WordPress savvy host sites and or assistance.

    Ray
  • I believe that online backups really help not to worry about losing all the data. There is a new CloudBerry online backup product powered by Amazon S3. You can sign-up for beta at http://cloudberrydrive.com
  • After lots and lots of comment spam, we tried and tested many WP plugins, however only one really worked, that was "Cookies for Comments"
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