New Nuke Security Sentinel: Worth Taking a Chance?

A hacked website can completely intimidate new webmasters, who have a tendency to become discouraged and abandon their systems rather than regain control or even disable the site. This fact leaves hundreds of sites running malicious attack code all over the net.

See this quick search of a known hacker that shows relevant returns well into 100 sites. These results are only for a search on one name!  You can see a few others have also taken advantage of this site.  Obviously, they have gained control of the admin function enough to alter the title of the web site, and the site has been sitting like this long enough for the search engines to have picked up the change.

Look below at an image of just some of the back office controls designed to keep the malicious out of Nuke sites.  For security professionals and code writers, these protective measures will be standard practice.

For the novice, however, injections are something accomplished with a needle, worms live in the garden and a flood is why Noah built the arc.

Controls and blocks against known threats are already included to protect sites from a large variety of moderate to severe attacks.  The image below shows controls on just one branch of the tree menu. Literally thousands of combinations of secured preferences can be assigned to the web site. So, vulnerability in one web site does not automatically mean vulnerability in all. That's another obstacle for intruders to overcome.

The Sentinel also provides specific admin protections and can be set to automatically write IP blocking information to Apache's .htaccess file.

While security programs generally offer a full set of functions to users, NukeSentinel provides an extra layer of protection for the Admin back office, which allows the user complete control over which functions are turned "on" or "off."  Shown below are the system's first 2 of 29 General Settings on NukeSentinel's main menu.

Beyond the ability to control a feature's basic on – off function, the developers of Sentinel also thought to allow varying degrees of protections for each threat.

If, for instance, you decide that you don't want proxies to access your web site, you aren't stuck with an all or nothing choice.  A block of this threat can be set to screen on a Lite, Mild or Strong level, directly from the drop down box.

Other threats can be controlled with ten levels of "punishment" for offenders, ranging from an email alert for the admin to an automatic temporary or permanent ban from your site.

This functionality allows tremendous control and customization for the non expert admin.

No longer does the novice, who may know something of PHP, but looks at the code and decides they shouldn't touch it for fear of "breaking" the application, have to pray for the best.  He can now approach site protection aggressively because security controls have been translated into something with which he is familiar.

Notice in the image above, the inclusion of an upto date! warning and simple links that open into deeper levels of security.

Notice also that Sentinel's control panel is loaded with helps. A click on a question mark brings up an instant answer to what a function is, or what it does.  A click on the "Blocker Configuration" help button reveals this pop up.

The Sentinel is not the most popular of the Nuke alternatives. For one, it is a little more difficult to install. Having been completely rewritten for security, the code is not always as easy to use as an upgrade on the existing version of an alternate Nuke system.

Once installed and working properly, the frequent bug fixes, patches and system upgrades from Sentinel version to Sentinel upgrade are managed without much problem.

With each upgrade, the developers have included an install program that makes much of the required fixes automatic and worry free for those who read the instructions first.