Posts tagged Hack

What I learned from my first OWASP meeting (or why I will never use PHP Nuke)

I just got home from attending my first meeting of the Phoenix chapter of OWASP. WOW!!! That’s all I have to say. The guest speaker was Mike Brooks, currently the top answerer and asker of security questions on Stack Overflow, who will be giving the same talk at the upcoming DEF CON 18. Mike gave an amazing presentation on chaining vulnerabilities in order to bypass layered security systems and ways of obtaining wormable remote code execution on a modern LAMP platform.
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Improve Your WordPress Blog’s Performance With this Database Hack

**UPDATE**: After further research of the query below, I have found some additional information. The query was first introduced in WP 2.3 and is used for comment flood protection. I am currently running WP 2.9.1 and do not have the issue as the query has been modified and using a proper index to assist with the query speed. If you are using the latest version of WP, you won’t have this problem. I am still trying to find exactly when the query was changed so you all can know where you stand. However, I know that some people don’t upgrade their WP version due to changes they have made which upgrading will break. If you are on an older version of WP and have a large number of comments (tens to hundreds of thousands), this query will help improve your comment post times. If you are familiar enough with MySQL, look at the wp_comments table in your database. If there is an index on the `comment_date_gmt` column, you are ok. If not, read on, and run the query below as adding an index to the `comment_date_gmt` column won’t work as your query does not have that column in it’s WHERE clause.

One of daily responsibilities as a database administrator is maintaining the health of our shared hosting environment. In doing so, I deal with plenty of WordPress blogs daily. The one thing I have noticed is that many WordPress plugins are very poorly designed and can cause problems in a shared hosting environment. WordPress at it’s core though, is very well designed, although I have noticed some areas of possible improvement. As I come across common issues, I will post the fixes for them here for all to use.
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