Video: WordCamp Atlanta Security Panel with Wordfence
In April, Wordfence sponsored WordCamp Atlanta and several of our team members attended the event. While there, we held a capture the flag (CTF) contest, which helps WordPress site owners learn to think like a hacker so that they can better defend their websites.
Part of hacker culture is the art of lock picking, which many of our team members do as a hobby. At WordCamp Atlanta, we taught many of the attendees to pick their first lock. Doing this is a great way to illustrate how it helps to think like your adversary when you are defending something. If you know how to pick a lock, you can better secure your home or office. Similarly, if you think like a hacker, you can better defend your WordPress websites. Our team does these demonstrations at every WordCamp we sponsor, and if you successfully pick a lock, we will award you a lock-pick set as a prize.
At WordCamp Atlanta, one of the scheduled speakers was unable to attend and our team volunteered to fill in. Four Wordfence team members participated in a panel, taking questions and discussing various WordPress security topics with the audience. Our panel consisted of:
Mark Maunder – CEO
Matt Barry – Lead Software Developer
Sean Murphy – Director of Threat Intelligence
Tim Cantrell – Customer Support Engineer
Aaron Campbell, the head of security for WordPress and an all-around great guy also makes an off-camera cameo. If you are interested in WordPress security and would like to get to know some of our best people a little better, I think you will really enjoy the conversation.
Video produced by nishasingh and originally published on WordPress.tv.
Comments
10:51 am
Have you listened to the sound quality on the video? It is barely intelligible. I am on a high speed connection, so it is not on my network. Any chance someone can check it out?
4:43 pm
Hi Mark, I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with sound quality on the video. It was shot and published by someone who I assume was a volunteer at WordCamp Atlanta, for which we're grateful.
4:34 pm
Very cool. I rarely ever watch videos like this and somehow I got stuck watching the whole thing.
The team is great and I appreciated seeing you guys in action. It's nice to see who is behind the scenes when dealing with services online.
Question though - why is this branded as WP.tv? Is that because they sponsored it?
Thanks,
Jason
4:51 pm
Hi Jason, the video was produced as part of WordCamp Atlanta and originally published on WordPress.tv.
6:00 pm
Thanks for publishing this. Recently my server was hacked. They didn't change any of my code (I have a security plugin that compares my WP core and plugins against the repository for any changes) but they kept my CPU and I/O processes maxed out to the point that I literally could not work on my site at all. Since I couldn't find anything injected into my site I couldn't figure out what they were doing with my resources. Watching this made me realize they were probably robbing my resources for cryptocurrency mining and gives me a point of reference to start researching how to prevent it in the future.
BTW I've been using Wordfence as my preferred WP firewall for years now. Thanks for all of your team's hard work! It makes my job a lot easier!
9:25 am
nice