Track Hackers in Real-Time with Defender’s All New Audit Logs

Track Hackers in Real-Time with Defender’s All New Audit Logs

Is anyone else freaking out about how many ridiculous new features the WPMU DEV super devs keep dropping on us? And the madness doesn’t stop. Our security plugin Defender just got a mega upgrade: Audit Logs!

Since Defender was launched we’ve added sooo much new stuff. Head over to the project page to check out all the new features! Check out Defender

Now with Defender, not only can you harden your security and block attackers, but audit logs now hold everyone on your site or network to account by tracking and logging Every. Single. Thing.

Every login attempt, every upload, every activation, every system change… You’ll know exactly who did what and when.

“This feature is so good, it really could be its own paid service.”
– Aaron Edwards, CTO

That All Sounds Pretty Cool, but What Does It Mean?

If you get hacked, just restore from a backup and everything will be a-okay, right?

Well, that’s not the whole story.

When did it happen? How did it happen? What restore point should you use? Will it happen again?

These are questions all of us are asking when trying to recover from a hack.

And with Defender’s new audit logging features it’s all right there, like your own personal surveillance camera, letting you review all the footage from the night before. See who logged in and what backdoor they used so you can beef up security and prevent another attack.

Audit Logging is like adding security cameras to the backend of your site.
Audit Logging is like adding security cameras to the backend of your site.

Now you might be asking, “Can’t hackers just erase or change the logs?” This is where Defender’s audit logs step into a league of their own. Every change is instantly stored on our secure cloud storage. No giant tables in your database. And most importantly your logs are permanent – they can’t be modified or deleted by an attacker.

It Must Be Really Hard to Use, Right?

Not one bit.

If you can click your mouse or trackpad, you can activate the new audit logging feature.

Here’s how to do it:

Once Defender is installed on your site, go to Audit Logs and click Enable Audit Logging. That’s it. If you blinked you might have missed it!

One-click activation for easy installation.
One-click activation for easy installation.

As an added bonus, you can activate email reports and get activity summaries sent to you daily, weekly or monthly direct to your inbox. Save time and keep track of your site.

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A Big Something Special for Multisite

What about Multisite? We run some pretty huge networks around here so we decided to test audit logging on some of our most active networks.

Let’s just say this is where Defender really flexes his muscles.

So How Has WPMU Used Audit Logs?

  • On one of our networks, audit logs was used by a super admin to keep tabs on updates and better handle quality control for distributed sites with local editors. The editor could take control of the site without having to write long reports on every change and still feel supported by the administrator.
  • On a membership site I help manage, customer activity logs gave our support team the power to make informed decisions resulting in better customer service, more informed billing support and fewer chargebacks. Built-in log search let our team quickly find specific user’s logs and narrow search by dates and activities.
Find user activity quickly the handy search tool.
Find user activity quickly the handy search tool.
  • On another network, we were able to detect an unusually high number of login attempts from one IP addresses caused by a brute force attack and blacklist the IP before the attack was successful.
  • On another test we ran, automated reports let all the site administrators keep up with stats and see how their sites were being used on a daily basis.
  • We even used audit logs to find users duplicating author names and attempting to hack our network.

Try Audit Logs for Free!

Audit logs alone will make installing Defender on your site worth it. But with regular security scans, blacklist monitoring, vulnerability reports, safety recommendations, 10GB of Snapshot backups and customized hardening – what are you waiting for?

Download Defender today (check it out for free!) and give your WordPress site a security overhaul.

How will you uses Audit Logging? Give it a spin and let us know what you think.

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Hassan Akhtar Hassan Akhtar is the lead dev for Smush and HummingBird. In his free time he enjoys writing about his development adventures at WPGurus.net.