Over a week ago I complained about WordPress users crying security wolf and not being able to recover their blog when the “Bad Thing(tm)” happens.

Since then a real brawl developed on the support forum that could be summed up like so:

  1. One or more users is insisting that there is an XMLRPC exploit in 2.5.1.
  2. The same one or more users refuses to back this claim up with data, or apparently send the WordPress security e-mail alias any info (maybe, how would other people know what was sent via e-mail?)
  3. Many people tried to reasonably explain that such an exploit may exist but without data there is nothing to solve.

This discussion was just plain nuts and went around in circles.  Complaining about a problem without providing any proof and then getting all pissy about it is totally useless.  It is entirely possible that such an exploit exists and many people replied so.  But without any providing data other than saying “I can assure you that the hack occurs via XMLRPC”, then everyone’s time gets wasted.

Fortunately, Donncha provided a page that covers the issue succinctly and today he added another post on setting up aide.  His two posts are good and anyone considering monitoring their WordPress files for modification should give this a try.

Aide will let you see if your installation files and directories have been tampered with.  It won’t protect you against HTTP POSTS or database attacks but it’s very good if someone succeeds in modifying your files.

There are ways to log what’s being sent via an HTTP POST and examine that information; if (or even when) I get hacked, I’ll try to start looking at that data.  MYSQL database monitoring, that could be interesting but for now I’m not aware of a good tool to do that.

On my OpenSuSE installation, installing aide is simple.  As root run

zypper install aide
aide --init
mv /var/lib/aide/aide.db.new /var/lib/aide/aide.db
aide --check
cp /usr/share/doc/packages/aide/examples/etc/cron.daily/aide.sh /etc/cron.daily/

All of which I just did.  I ran the check option to make sure I did not create any issues with the aide.conf file.  I’ll play with the aide.conf file and see what kind of output I get when the daily cron job gets run.  If I add and modify files and I set it up correctly then I should see that in daily cron job’s output.

Update: this worked but in /etc/aide.conf change the line verbose=1 to verbose=5.  That will get you a useful output of which files and directories changed.