You Are Being Spammed: WP Cerber and Why We Use It
Right now, and in the time it will take you to read this article, something will quietly try to break into your website. Yes, your website. And yes, they are interested in your wee business, trust us.
You see, it won’t necessarily by a hacker in hoodie, hunched over their keyboard doing the break-in. It’s more likely to be a bored little robot, one of thousands roaming the internet, jiggling the handles on every technical back door it can find. And these bots don’t care what your business is or does.
They don’t see you as big or small, they just see your website as an open or closed door. They don’t care that your website sells hand-poured candles or manages your accountancy clients. They are just ambling about the internet, looking for ways in so they can spray your comments section with dodgy links, overrun your contact forms with spammy opportunities, or guess their way into your login page. They are literally chancing their luck, and if you make it easy for them to get in, they’ll take advantage.
Cunningly Good Group builds all its websites on the WordPress platform. We love it because it’s open source and ensures you can have confidence in the flexibility and longevity of your build. But, because it’s open source, because it’s such a massive market, there’s literally hundreds, if not thousands, of back doors. It’s not because the coding is poor, it’s because the source code is openly available. Freedom has a price.
This is why every website that we build and host we use WP Cerber as just one of the suite of security plugins we deploy.
WP Cerber is, in non-technical terms, the big burly bouncer standing at the door of your website – and it doesn’t just check that you’re on the guest list, it watches what you’re up to and then decides if you are a good or a bad actor.
If someone is hammering your login page with password guesses a hundred times a minute, they will be blocked – even if it’s you and you legitimately forgot your password and had a few goes just in case it would come back to you! If you are filling out your enquiry form in 0.3 seconds flat it will be binned before it ever reaches your inbox – no human works that fast – only machines do. Or maybe, all of a sudden, you will have traffic arriving from known spam networks and dodgy corners of the internet – WP Cerber will turn them away at the gate.
We use it because prevention is a much easier to manage than recovery.
A spammed comments section not only looks unprofessional, it can quietly destroy your credibility with visitors, and it takes time to properly clear up.
A brute-force break-in can hand over the keys to your entire site (and your customer data if it’s an e-commerce site) and then you are in very hot water on a number of fronts.
The clever part is that WP Cerber does almost all of this invisibly, behind the scenes, much like us. You won’t realise it but rarely a day goes by where our team are not responding to a new internet based threat and updating the technology around your website to ensure it stays safe.
Your genuine visitors also won’t notice a thing. There’s no annoying “prove you’re human” puzzles, no extra hoops to jump through, WP Cerber is just working quietly in the background with a knack for spotting trouble and heading it off at the pass.
If you’ve ever wondered what exactly we’re doing behind the scenes to keep your site tidy, safe, and spam-free, now you know: we’ve got a very alert, very unglamorous little guard on duty, and honestly, we’re rather fond of it even if it is prone to sounding the alarm and occasionally panicking clients. You can rest assured that your site is safe and that WP Cerber is doing its job.
This is the first in a series of articles we are going to be publishing that explains what technology and features sit behind your website and your ongoing security maintenance. Our team are here to assist so if you ever need to contact a team member, we’re at the end of the phone on 01738 658187 or email us at info@wearecunninglygood.com
