All You Need to Know about the New WP Toolkit 3.5 [ VIDEO ]

1.    New Hotlink Protection

Preventing other websites from displaying, linking or embedding your images (hotlinking), as this quickly drains your bandwidth and can make your site unavailable.

2.    Disable unused scripting languages

This security measure removes support for the scripting languages WordPress doesn’t use, like Python and Perl. Thus, blocking their related vulnerabilities. Available if you have the corresponding Hosting Settings management permission.

3.    New Bot Protection

Blocks bots that overload your site with unwanted requests, causing resource overuse. Note that you may want to temporarily disable this if you also use a service that scans your site for vulnerabilities, since it may also use bots.

4.    Disabled file editing in WP Dashboard

This measure prevents you from editing plugin and theme file sources directly in the WordPress interface. This is an extra protection layer for the WordPress instance in case an admin account is compromised so no malicious executable code gets into plugins or themes.

5.    Block access to sensitive files

Now you can choose to block files like wp-config.bak and wp-config.php.swp, from public access as they contain sensitive information, like connection credentials. Thus, also preventing exposure of files with info used to determine your WordPress instance. Also included are files like logs, shell scripts and other executables that may exist on your WordPress instance and whose security can be compromised.

6.    Block author scans / user ID phishing

These scans find registered usernames, especially WordPress admin, and brute-force attack your site’s login page. The above block prevents this, but note that depending on your site’s permalink configuration, you may also be preventing visitors from accessing pages that list all articles by a certain author.

7.    Block access to .htaccess and .htpasswd

Attackers who gain access to .htaccess and .htpasswd files can exploit your site to a variety of breaches. These files aren’t usually accessible by default, but sometimes they might be. This is where this security measure steps in.

8.    Disable PHP execution in cache directories

If a compromised PHP file ends up in one of the cache directories of your site, executing it can lead to compromising the whole site. So this measure disables execution of PHP files in cache directories to prevent such exploits. However, certain plugins and themes may ignore WordPress Security recommendations and store valid PHP executables in their cache anyway. So you can disable this security feature for them to work, or find a more secure alternative, as recommended.

You’re in Control of Security Updates

You should be able to supervise any website-affecting changes so WP Toolkit won’t automatically apply these new security measures on existing installations. So upon opening your list of WordPress instances after the WP Toolkit 3.5 update, you’ll see a one-time notification about this.

On that note, you’ll now see that two existing security measures are now less restrictive. First, the “Security of the wp-includes directory” checker now excludes the wp-tinymce.php file to avoid potential issues with Gutenberg and other editing  plugins. Second, the “Security of the wp-content directory” measure now prevents the execution of PHP files only in the wp-content/uploads directory.