For 20 years or so, there has been the debate over whether you should use www or not in your web site’s canonical hostname. So should you use www or not?
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Tag Archives: configuration
Restrict allowed HTTP methods in Nginx
Security vulnerabilities are often exploits of software that fails when trying to deal with unexpected input. Other times they are exploits of a misconfiguration or a service that unintentionally was open to the public.
For the above reasons, we should limit as much as possible what services are exposed to the public and limit as much as possible what they do and accept from the visitors. To follow those security principles, we should only allow the HTTP methods for which we, in fact, provide services. Under all normal circumstances, that would be the methods GET, POST and HEAD.
Block access to PHP files on your WordPress site with Nginx
In your WordPress site, there are directories that include PHP files that visitors should never be able to access directly. They are only there for WordPress to function as an application that runs on your server. But because of WordPress’ directory and file structure, they are kind of accessible to the public. All of them are meant to be part of a larger application – WordPress, that is – and should not cause any harm if called directly – that we know. Some of the files execute some code even when ran standalone. An attacker might know of a clever way to make that code run in an unexpected manner, causing harm. To be on the safe side, we should deny access to all these PHP files from the outside world. Since we block access to them in our Nginx configuration, PHP will still run them as usual and WordPress will work just fine.
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