"WordPress 3 Ultimate Security" Book Takes Aim at Hackers

Online, June 27, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Written for noobs and pros alike by Olly Connelly, aka the_guv on his guvnr.com and vpsBible.com websites and @the_guv on Twitter, and published by the technical house Packt Publishing, the book addresses not merely WordPress directly but tackles the myriad of ways that WordPress, its database and copyright content can be breached indirectly, via its wider network. As the author states in the work's Preface:-

"Most likely, today, some hacker tried to crack your WordPress site. Maybe that was some bored kid. Just as likely‎, it was an automated hit trying dozens of attacks to find a soft spot. Quite likely it was both.

"The threatscape is vast. Risk stretches from your keyboard, through and out the back of your local machine, buzzing around its network, maybe through your phone, into the router, hopping across your surfing, into the remote server, buzzing around that network and jumping all over WordPress."

As such, WordPress 3 Ultimate Security doesn't simply expand upon those few, heavily-blogged, WordPress-specific security tips, but considers each and every potential breach of site and content security, detailing preventative measures from shoring up the local administrator's devices all the way through to layering defense in depth techniques on the server.

The book contains hundreds of external references to true-tested plugins, security wares and modules and to security and ethical hacking resources. It explains how safely to administer WordPress, for instance using HTTPS, SFTP and SSH or when using a shared terminal, cafe or wifi hotspot. It has chapters dedicated to copyright protection, to setting up a security policy, how properly to recover from disaster and how to evaluate a web host. Proactively, it even tutors readers with the hacker's methodology, and toolset, so as to uncover vulnerabilities by hacking ourselves, safely, before someone else does, maliciously.

"Your site is only as safe as its weakest local-to-remote link," says Connelly. "This work is designed to address that, from A to Z and, frankly, while there's no silver bullet, we can reduce the risk of a successful attack from practically inevitable to practically zero."