Preventing Brute Force Attacks Against WordPress Websites

A 'brute force' login attack is a type of attack against a website to gain access to the site by guessing the username and password, over and over again. Other kinds of hacks rely on website vulnerabilities whereas a brute force attack is a simple hit and miss method and can be tried on any site.

In this tutorial, we will cover some methods and plugins we can use to prevent brute force attacks against WordPress sites. WordPress is the most popular CMS and therefore it's a frequent target of these type of attacks.

What's the Difference Between a Brute Force Attack and a DDoS Attack?

A brute force attack is performed to gain access to someone else's account on the site, whereas a DDoS attack is usually launched to take a site down (typically by consuming resources). That said, a large scale brute force attack can also take a site down.

A DDoS attack is usually performed using a bot, whereas a brute force attack can be made using a bot or by a human. Humans can launch more targeted attacks, especially if they know usernames or have other intelligence to narrow down possible credentials.

Neither of these kinds of attacks rely on the website vulnerabilities and can be applied to any website.

WordPress doesn't have any built in feature to prevent these two types of attacks. Therefore, it's your responsibility to prevent them on your own sites.

This tutorial will show you how you can prevent brute force attacks.

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by Narayan Prusty via SitePoint

Create Space Invaders with Swift and Sprite Kit: Implementing Classes

Laravel Blade Recursive Partials with @each

In this tutorial, we’ll go through the process of implementing recursive partials in Laravel’s Blade templating engine by means of the @each command. This will allow us to render data structures with an arbitrary number of nested children without needing to know the maximum depth of the array.

The Data

The data I’m talking about is data like folder structures which can go deep into many levels. For our case, let’s imagine we’re dealing with a predefined data set of “Projects” in a todo application like Todoist. Feel free to grab the sample data from this gist or the code embed below:

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by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint

What is the WebP Image Format (And Why Does It Matter)?

The WebP format is a new image format from Google which employs both lossy (a trade-off between quality and size) as well as lossless (reduction in size with no compromise in quality) compression techniques.

Google is developing both the format and WebP related software under the BSD license. It was initially released on 30 September 2010 and is an open format. It uses the file extension is .webp.

Basic Mechanism of WebP Compression

The lossy WebP algorithm uses predictive encoding to predict the values of colors of it's neighboring pixels. It then only encodes the difference between the actual values and predictions. Out of these encoded or residual values, many are null or zero and this phenomenon contributes in further decreasing the size of the WebP image.

Hence, the WEBP lossy compression -- like JPEG -- is based on block prediction.

Support and Usage

Google Chrome and Opera both natively support WebP. Amongst graphics softwares, Picasa, PhotoLine, Pixelmator, ImageMagick, Konvertor, XnView, IrfanView and GDAL all natively support WebP.

Facebook has begun using WebP to lower its network costs and speed up its web site. Even relatively small efficiency wins start to add up at Facebook's scale. When people upload JPEG/JPG images, Facebook automatically makes copies in WebP format. They've now apparently begun delivering those images to people using Chrome and Opera.

Telegram too has started using WebP for it's popular stickers. The Instant Previews feature of Google Search uses WebP internally to reduce disk space used by previews.

The major problems arise when a person wants to view the image in software other than a web browser or make edits to it as majority of the most popular graphics applications -- including Window's or OS X's image viewer and Photoshop -- can't natively handle WebP.

In October 2013, Josh Aas from Mozilla Research published a comprehensive study of current lossy encoding techniques and wasn't able to conclude that WebP outperformed JPEG by any significant margin.

However, Telegraphics has released a free plug-in that enables WebP support in Adobe Photoshop, GIMP and Paint.NET support WebP via plugins. Google has also released a plug-in for Windows that enables WebP support in Windows Photo Viewer, Microsoft Office 2010 and any other application that makes use of Windows Imaging Component.

Benefits and Statistics

Google's WebP documentation claims:

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.

Conversion to WebP

WebP's documentation provides access to a pre-compiled software for converting PNG and JPEG images to a WebP image. You can read more about it and download it from here. Here is the link to an online converter which accomplishes the task without downloading any software.

Making WebP Stickers For Telegram

We have talk about WebP enough. Let's bring our knowledge of WebP to some constructive and creative use. We will look at how to make stickers for Telegram from a JPEG image and convert it to a .webp file. We're going to make our sticker from the following image.

We would be making use of Photoshop to make the image background transparent. We would do that by choosing 'Background Eraser Tool'. We would also crop the image since it is quite big!

Next we will select the current layer and apply Blending Options (stroke) on it and select white color. Also, ew need to select Drop Shadow to create a subtle shadow effect and I save it in PNG format.

Finally we will use the online converter to convert the image to .webp format and our sticker is ready!

You can make many other stickers in a similar fashion for distribution amongst your friends on Telegram.

Conclusion

WebP is an emerging image compression format and being backed by Google, Facebook, Opera and Telegram has certainly boosted its popularity. It's a format that already has a healthy collection of fans along with as detractors.

However, being able to pack the goodness of GIF and PNG into one format with a reduced image size will continue to tempt web developers to create smaller and richer images.

And if that helps make the whole web faster, we all win.

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by Tanay Pant via SitePoint

Wikipedia

Minimal One Pager for 'Wikipedia' featuring an uncluttered UI and modern flat design. The consideration for whitespace and effort to declutter perfectly leads the visitor to the obvious call-to-action, and in turn increases conversions. Smart.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

8 Ways Twitter Chats Can Benefit Your Business

Are you active on Twitter? Does your business participate in Twitter chats? While it may be more challenging for businesses to participate in chats from behind a logo, it can be done. In this article I’ll explain how to engage in Twitter chats as your business, so you can grow your network. #1: Give a […]

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Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Jacob Curtis via Social Media Examiner

The Web Runs Out of Disk Space

At the start of the decade, the total storage required for every web file was estimated to have reached five zettabytes. Within a few years, the world will be generating fifty zettabytes of data every year. A zettabyte is one billion terabytes -- or 10²¹ bytes. It's a lot, and hard disk manufacturers cannot keep pace with demand. The numbers are not surprising when you consider more than four people are born every second. This is significantly higher than disk drive production. The 50Zb estimate would be exceeded if everyone on the planet uploaded just two photographs annually. I interviewed Prof. Ali Lo who heads the Taskforce Utilizing Redundant Disk Space:

The web is at crisis point. It cannot cope with the sustained influx of new data. We have deleted temporary files, backed-up to the cloud, archived to DVDs and defragmented several times. Nothing helps: every byte is used the moment it's freed.

Web Usage Breakdown

Sir Tim Berners-Lee devised the web to share research information in hyper-linked documents. Within twenty-five years, it now consists:

• 28.65% pictures of cats


• 16.80% vain selfies


• 14.82% pointless social media chatter


• 12.73% inane vlogger videos


• 9.76% advertising/clickbait pages


• 8.70% scams and cons


• 4.79% articles soliciting spurious statistics


• 3.79% new JavaScript tools/libraries


• 0.76% documents for the betterment of human knowledge

Prof. Ali Lo stated:

There are now more pictures of cats on the web than there are cats.

Social Media Stockpile

The success of social media has exponentially increased data usage. People are expected to document their daily routine with comments, photographs and videos. Much of this content is never viewed by anyone but it remains stored forever. If a post does go viral, the same data is replicated thousands of times by different people across different networks. The situation will worsen when Facebook's Fetus project is launched. The ambitious service will automatically open an account, record a timeline and send status updates before you are born.

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by Craig Buckler via SitePoint