Interpreting log files (for beginners)

Hi @mark-housel,

I suspect it is not just someone accessing my web site looking at it.

That’s true.

Someone attempts to upload malware or backdoor via the following vulnerabilities:

• RevSlider Vulnerability Leads To Massive WordPress SoakSoak Compromise
• Uploadify, Uploadify and Uploadify – The New TimThumb?
• yiw_contact sendemail file upload vulnerability

I think you might have similar attacks from different IP addresses. So I strongly recommend you to select “Verify capability and MIME type” at “Prevent malicious upload” in “Validation rule settings” section. This option enables to block this kind of malware and backdoor uploading.

And the list in “Whitelist of allowed MIME type” shows many types of file, but you should select only you need.

I hope this can help you, and feel free to ask something more.
Thanks for asking.

Thank you. I made those changes.

I had misinterpreted the upload selection “Disable” to mean disable uploads.
No one should ever be uploading anything to my site.

Hi Mark,

I appreciate your feedback!

I should implement the functionality to summarize and indicate what kind of validation rules are applied in your site at some widget on dashboard.

Thanks again!

I noticed another ‘result’ that I hadn’t seen before [ upload* ] and it seems that a file was being uploaded. I am not understanding whether it was successful or not, or whether this indicates that it had been somehow stopped.

BTW, this IP address has subsequently been blocked.

Thank you,
Mark

Date IP address Code Result Request

2017-06-13 10:13:11 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/license.php
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [filename] => Array ( [name] => 07545460.php [type] => application/x-php [tmp_name] => /tmp/phpdXuhjN [error] => 0 [size] => 85 ) ) ,1

2017-06-13 10:13:09 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/license.php
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [filename] => Array ( [name] => 07545460.php [type] => application/x-php [tmp_name] => /tmp/phpOCXQH8 [error] => 0 [size] => 85 ) ) ,1

2017-06-13 10:13:05 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/uploadify/uploadify.php?folder=/
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [Filedata] => Array ( [name] => 894613256498.php [type] => text/php [tmp_name] => /tmp/phpImkYr5 [error] => 0 [size] => 66 ) ) ,1

2017-06-13 10:13:03 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/uploadify/uploadify.php?folder=/
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [Filedata] => Array ( [name] => 894613256498.php [type] => text/php [tmp_name] => /tmp/phpHxqT2a [error] => 0 [size] => 66 ) ) ,1

2017-06-13 10:12:56 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [yiw_contact] => Array ( [name] => Array ( [0] => 51217766.php ) [type] => Array ( [0] => text/php ) [tmp_name] => Array ( [0] => /tmp/phpM9lQgV ) [error] => Array ( [0] => 0 ) [size] => Array ( [0] => 67 ) ) ) ,yiw_action,id_form

2017-06-13 10:12:53 192.187.100.58 US upload* POST[80]:/
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) Firefox/3.5.0
HTTP headers:
HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wp-admin/
$_POST data:
FILES=Array ( [yiw_contact] => Array ( [name] => Array ( [0] => 51217766.php ) [type] => Array ( [0] => text/php ) [tmp_name] => Array ( [0] => /tmp/phpU4AGqq ) [error] => Array ( [0] => 0 ) [size] => Array ( [0] => 67 ) ) ) ,yiw_action,id_form

Hi Mark,

I am not understanding whether it was successful or not, or whether this indicates that it had been somehow stopped.

I think you select “Only when blocked” at “Record validation logs” in “Record settings” section. So all those were blocked. When your selection is “All of validation“, you’ll find “passed” in the result which is not blocked.

Please refer to Description of “Result”.

Thanks.

Yes, I have ‘blocked’ in that setting so the “upload*” was what confused me and I hadn’t seen that list before.
So, that clears it up.

Thanks,
Mark

I have only the US country code whitelisted (all others black listed) but I see lots of Canadian hits showing up in awstats, but no CA IP addresses being blocked? I see many other foreign countries blocked in the logs.
Is Canada considered to be close enough to the US to allow IP addresses from there?

United States us 19,155 53,320 673.03 MB
Canada ca 138 845 10.54 MB

My public facing pages settings are Block by Country
Matching rule Whitelist
US country code as the only whitelisted country
Validation target all requests
DNS reverse lookup enabled.
Response code 301

Thank you,
Mark

FWIW, I have also noticed a general decrease in the overall number of foreign IP addresses, and other break in attempts that are apparently even trying to access the site. Is this typical, do they figure out somehow not to bother after being blocked effectively for some time?

Thank you,
Mark

Hi @mark-housel,

I don’t want to spent much time to read the documentation about SWStats in place of you, but I found the following:

Because AWStats is a log analyzer, if you don’t have any way to read your server log file, you have nothing to analyze and you should not be able to use AWStats. However, this is a trick that you can use to have a log file be built.

So your comparison makes no sense, because one is at the server level like apache or nginx and the other is at the application level like PHP, WordPress and the plugin.

Regarding to your settings:

Response code 301

I think you had better to design how to treat visitors from outside your country. If you leave “Redirect URL” at “Front-end target settings” section empty, they would be redirected to your home. I recommend you to navigate them to some page where they can find your site policy about why they’re redirected to there.

And regarding to your last question, I don’t know how you measure “a general decrease in the overall number of foreign IP addresses“, but in generally you had better to think about SEO. And I’m sorry but I don’t have expertise in SEO.

Is this typical, do they figure out somehow not to bother after being blocked effectively for some time?

This question is out of the scope of this forum. Actually, I don’t know (neither care) about the behavior of attackers.

I’d appreciate your understanding.
Thanks.

Thank you once again for answering all my beginner questions.

I was wondering why someone would be looking at this file? Is this legitimate?

2017-06-28 12:59:40 173.208.169.26 US passed GET[443]:/wp/wp-admin/setup-config.php
User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
HTTP headers:
$_POST data:

Hi @mark-housel,

I was wondering why someone would be looking at this file? Is this legitimate?

NO. Usually, it returns

The file ‘wp-config.php’ already exists. If you need to reset any of the configuration items in this file, please delete it first.

This is not useful for everybody. But some hackers attempt to put their code of malware or backdoor into the WP core files. I think “/wp-admin/setup-config.php” is suitable to hide their code because it would not never be accessed after your installation of WP.

An example of backdoor can be found in https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/wp-config-keeps-adding-new-lines/

I recommend you to check integrity of core files using some tool like Wordfence. And I’d appreciate if you let me know the result.

Good luck!

I ran a full scan and Wordfence didn’t find any serious issues other than some old files from previously deleted plugins and my site specific PDF order forms that customers can download.

It found some plugins that are what they consider “abandoned” as they hadn’t been updated in a couple years. I got rid of a couple of them since they didn’t make a lot of sense with the Woocommerce storefront theme.

I did change the permissions to 444 on that file as suggested as a workaround for their problem at the link you sent.
I suppose that unless a file needs to be changed dynamically by WordPress then there is no reason to have them writable anyway?

Thank you,
Mark

Hi,

I am wondering if I might have some configuration setting slightly off.
The problem that I see on occasion, that I finally reduced to a set of operations that I can duplicate is as follows.

While logged into my web site, I receive an email with an order through my Woocommerce store.
If I look at the order there is a link in the order number that I can follow that should take me to that order.
What happens is that I end up at a screen that indicates an error with a link back to the Dashboard.

If I go to my dashboard, than I can open the order and everything appears to be normal.

The Log file shows this process as shown below from the log file, where 71.0.185.248 was my IP address at the time. FWIW, and might be associated with this, I recently changed internet service from ADSL to Cable and now my IP address is both different than before (expected) but also changes all the time now whereas previously it was very stable.

Is there some setting that I might adjust to allow me to look at an order from the email link? At least if I am currently logged into the web site.

Thank you for answering all of my beginner questions,
Mark

2017-07-28 14:27:56 71.0.185.248 US wp-zep GET[443]:/wordpress/wp-admin/edit.php?s&post_status=all&post_type=product&_wpnonce=d5d716f84e&_wp_http_referer=%2Fwordpress%2Fwp-admin%2Fedit.php%3Fpost_type%3Dproduct%26ip-geo-block-auth-nonce%3De24a9f8dba&action=-1&product_cat&product_type=composite&fil

User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36
HTTP headers:
HTTP_DNT=1,HTTP_REFERER=https://www.landmprecisiongunworks.com/wordpress/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=product&ip-geo-block-auth-nonce=e24a9f8dba,HTTP_UPGRADE_INSECURE_REQUESTS=1

Hi Mark,

Thank you for asking.

That’s is the specification of this plugin. Let me explain.

Imagine that you have an vulnerable plugin in your site. When you receive the malicious email that disguises ordinary content and has a malicious link, your site would be infected by malware or hacked your site.

This scenario is the same as you experienced. This mechanism is done by “Prevent Zero-day Exploit” aka “WP-ZEP”.

To improve convenience, this plugin provide users to apply the specific “exception” using “Exceptions” in “Plugins area” and “Themes area”. But unfortunately, the signature for /wp-admin/edit.php is not supported for exceptions.

Currently, I can propose something to bypass WP-ZEP using custom filter hook ip-geo-block-bypass-admins and drop-in.php in your Geolocation API library folder.

And furthermore, if you are using free version of WooCommerce products, I can test them to improve this situation for the future. So I’d appreciate if you provide your “Installation information” in “Plugin settings” section to let me know what plugins and themes you are using.

I hope this answer may help you.
Thanks.

Supplementary note:

The vulnerability of plugins or themes in the scenario I described at the previous thread is named as CSRF. And it often combined attack method such as XSS and SQLi.

If you interested in those in WordPress, please refer to Why so many WordPress plugins vulnerable?.