WP Shield Security – Release 6.1

Release Date: 15th January 2018

We’ve been hard at work adding to the new Shield Wizard system we released in v6.0.

We’ve added a new step to that first Welcome wizard to help eliminate the problem of detecting visitor IP addresses. This should reduce issues for certain hosting environments that aren’t consistent in their IP address detection.

3x Brand New Walk-Through Wizards

We’ve added 3x new wizards in particular areas that we feel cause the most trouble. These are:

1. Multi-factor login authentication setup. The new walk-through wizard will not only help explain it all, but it’ll help you setup email authentication reliably on your server, verifying that your site can actually send emails.
2. WordPress Core File Scanner. Until now it’s been a bit of a mystery on how you can manually scan your core files. This was in-part because we didn’t have a consistent user-interface for performing these tasks. With the wizard system, now we do.  You can now scan your WordPress Core files whenever you like by running the wizard, and repair any files as you need. It’ll still run automatically for you each night, if you set it to.
3. WordPress Unrecognised File Scanner. Just like the previous scanner, you can run it on demand, and delete any files detected that you don’t want to keep. You can also add to the exclusions list as you go.

We have more plans for the walk-through wizards so stayed tuned.

Easy Access To Wizards

Each module may or may not have its own set of wizards.

To see if wizards exist, and to access them, we’ve provided an easy-to-access link for each module. This will bring you to a page that lists all the wizards for the module and let you pick the one you want.

File Scanning Emails Link To New Wizards

The original notification emails for the file scanners (mentioned above) were fit for purpose but no more than that. They told you what had been discovered and let you click a link to fix it. But that was all the interaction that was provided.

Now, with those new wizards, we’re linking directly to the wizards to let you walk through and interact with the scanners more easily. You’ll have much more control and can see exactly what’s going on.

Support For Regular Expressions In File Exclusions

The ‘Unrecognised File Scanner‘ allows you to specify file names and paths to ignore. Until now it was simple file name matching.

With this release, you can now provide regular expressions to match multiple files. If you’re unsure of what this means, you can ignore it and use the file exclusions as normal – simply put in file names of files to ignore.

How to use regular expressions for file names:

• Any regular expressions must be surrounded by hashes, i.e. #
• You’ll need to escape/quote any special characters.
• An example is: #\.log#
• This example will match error.log, test.log.txt and so they’ll be excluded

Options Page Design Improvements

We’ve been slowing evolving the options pages over the past few releases. Some of you have liked the changes, some of you haven’t. We take on all the feedback, good and bad, and adjust accordingly.

This release sees a cleaner design aspect, with more room to display help text and little less of a “boxy” feel overall. We think it’s cleaner and neater, and easier to read.

Performance Improvements and Refactoring

We include this here to just let you know that we’ve made a few significant changes to how the plugin starts-up. It shouldn’t cause any trouble, but you never know. Feel free to report problems if you find them.