Security measures

Hey, @hansen, @jtittle, @sierracircle

Thanks for your contribution. I’ll study them and come back for any doubts i may encounter.

All the best!

Hi @Areku

Let’s break it down :-)

Let’s Encrypt - will only give protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, where someone sniffs the username/password when you for instance login from a public connection like the local coffee shop. But it’s very important to protect against that - and it comes with extra features such as http/2 and better SEO.

Firewall - will only allow access to whatever ports you’ve allowed. This is important to ensure you don’t accidentally have your database available from the outside. You can enhance the firewall by actively monitoring the log files with something like fail2ban which blocks multiple login failures. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-wordpress-with-fail2ban-on-ubuntu-14-04 Instead of using the plugin WP fail2ban please consider WP Fail2Ban Redux

Up-to-date - keeping both plugins and themes, but also Ubuntu up-to-date is probably the thing that will keep you most secure. And avoid plugins/themes that has not been updated for a long time.

WordFence - will give you extra security, but fail2ban will help with some of the most critical part, which is brute-force login attacks.

+Passwords - remember to have unique, strong, long passwords. And use public keys for SSH and the like if possible.

+Backup - have multiple backups (in multiple locations) and check that they actually work. This is probably the best security you can have.

I like to use Login Lockdown plugin. for .htaccess my goto is: https://perishablepress.com/6g/

Also, I always change my wp-login.php to something different. You can google for various methods to do that. It is not hard, and keeps a lot of scripted hack attempts off your Wordpress (which can crash your database)

Also: set up a swap file. set up regular backups of your Wordpress database and files (I use DO volumes to backup everything…then unmount the volume when not in use)