Going Live - Prevent Hacking Tips/Tools

mikiliste

Member
Hello Everyone,

I am planning to go live with my site and I was wondering if there are any security tips or addons that I can install to protect/prevent the site being hacked.
Thank you very much!
 
Stop any and all bots from registering:

Stop any and all bot login attempts (great for brute force attacks):

Stop any and all bots from flooding your inbox via the "Contact Us" form:

Log all legitimate queries via "Contact Us" for viewing without leaving your site:

None of these really fight "hacking" per se, but do stop bot invasion activity. And are really cool.
 
XF is extremely secure. I haven't seen a single case of hacked XF installation in all those years.

Unless you run something else on your server, like Wordpress, which then gets hacked (happens sometimes because of WP Addons), for XF you don't need extra measures.

But what you could do is to enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) to have better password protection (I would say 99% of "hacked" stuff on the internet is due to people finding out passwords). You can enable it in ACP in permissions.
Another thing is you could enable password protection with htaccess for ACP.

But mostly, you don't need to do those stuff, unless you are very popular and you are targeted very often.
 
Thank you very much @sbj very much appreciate your input. I have already unable 2FA for Admins. I will see how it goes, if I need to take the other steps.
 
Stop any and all bots from registering

Stop any and all bot login attempts (great for brute force attacks)

Stop any and all bots from flooding your inbox via the "Contact Us" form
No Add-on will ever be able to stop all those bot activities, the max. you can do is to slow down bots and filter the majority.

The only 100% bulletproff solution would be to turn those festures off.
 
XF is extremely secure. I haven't seen a single case of hacked XF installation in all those years.

Unless you run something else on your server, like Wordpress, which then gets hacked (happens sometimes because of WP Addons), for XF you don't need extra measures.

But what you could do is to enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) to have better password protection (I would say 99% of "hacked" stuff on the internet is due to people finding out passwords). You can enable it in ACP in permissions.
Another thing is you could enable password protection with htaccess for ACP.

But mostly, you don't need to do those stuff, unless you are very popular and you are targeted very often.
I get that XF might be secure, but can’t your FTP account/cPanel be hacked regardless?

Sorry if that is a dumb question.
 
I get that XF might be secure, but can’t your FTP account/cPanel be hacked regardless?
Well the server on which you are hosted can be hacked of course.
But unless you give your passwords away, that is highly unlikely that any 3rd person will have access to your environment. Even if they gained access through you, they can't just have access to everyone, but you could be screwed then.
If you are on a host which has cPanel, it means you are on a managed environment. Those guys have all the standard protections one can have in the business. So, if they get hacked, any of us can get hacked basically, which is of course very unlikely.

Again, most of the time there is no real hacking involved. Everything is standardized and protected on a deep level. Maybe 20 years ago this would have been the case, not today. Today, mostly people gain access because of password guessing or finding it out somehow.
Usually root user and password is "admin" or "root" or something easy like that.
 
If you are hosting XF via a VPS (not managed hosting) IMHO you would be crazy to allow direct root access over ssh + ftp.

At least disable direct logins via the root acoount, and perhaps even bump up security by using encrypted key pairs rather than just passwords and logins. Key pairs will always. Be more secure than passwords.

Add your admin accounts on the VPS to the sudo group. If you need root access you can always get it temporarily via the su - command.

Implement Fail2Ban on your VPS server to prevent against brute force attacks.
 
Well the server on which you are hosted can be hacked of course.
But unless you give your passwords away, that is highly unlikely that any 3rd person will have access to your environment. Even if they gained access through you, they can't just have access to everyone, but you could be screwed then.
If you are on a host which has cPanel, it means you are on a managed environment. Those guys have all the standard protections one can have in the business. So, if they get hacked, any of us can get hacked basically, which is of course very unlikely.

Again, most of the time there is no real hacking involved. Everything is standardized and protected on a deep level. Maybe 20 years ago this would have been the case, not today. Today, mostly people gain access because of password guessing or finding it out somehow.
Usually root user and password is "admin" or "root" or something easy like that.
I suppose this is reassuring, thanks.
you can always opt to not use those features ;P
sorry if that is a dumb answer lol, its the path we chose anyway ;)
If I don't use cPanel/FTP, I wouldn't know how to manage my site. (noob alert)
If you are hosting XF via a VPS (not managed hosting) IMHO you would be crazy to allow direct root access over ssh + ftp.

At least disable direct logins via the root acoount, and perhaps even bump up security by using encrypted key pairs rather than just passwords and logins. Key pairs will always. Be more secure than passwords.

Add your admin accounts on the VPS to the sudo group. If you need root access you can always get it temporarily via the su - command.

Implement Fail2Ban on your VPS server to prevent against brute force attacks.
As I stated above about being a noob, this is above my level of server experience. I suppose I could look into a server admin for this stuff.
 
As I stated above about being a noob, this is above my level of server experience. I suppose I could look into a server admin for this stuff.
You shouldn't need to. You can find everything you need via Google, and plenty of examples and HOW-TOs.

You don't have to worry much at all about XenForo's security. More important that your server/environment is secure(d).
 
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