MarkMaunder dot com

Has your WordPress Blog been Hacked? Email me now!

Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. If your WordPress blog has been hacked, please email me. I’m collecting data on intrusion methods and backdoors. If you’ve been hacked, I’ll examine your server free of charge, share what I find with […]

September 6, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Security, TimThumb, Wordpress | No comments

Breaking: Google starts to block hacked WordPress blogs as attack widens

Big News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. I’ve had two reports in the last 12 hours of WordPress blogs that were compromised via the Timthumb hack being listed as malware by Google. If you try to visit either site, you are […]

August 23, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Security, Wordpress | No comments

WordPress Security: Please delete old themes and plugins

News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. I was contacted by another site owner who was hacked via vulnerable WordPress themes today. He had updated to the latest non-vulnerable version of his theme, but the WordPress theme installation or update process doesn’t […]

August 19, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Security, TimThumb, Wordpress | No comments

DeployMint: A Staging and Deployment system for WordPress

Exec Summary: Today I’m launching a Beta open source project called DeployMint. I’m using it on WordPress installations where WordPress is being used as a CMS. It runs as a WordPress plugin and allows for staging and deployment of WordPress sites along with robust version control and zero down-time during deployments. It uses the Git […]

August 19, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, DeployMint, Wordpress | 10 comments

Advanced WordPress: How to get Real WordPress Commenter IP Addresses behind your Nginx Proxy

News [April 24th, 2012]: I’ve launched Wordfence to permanently fix your WordPress site’s security issues. Click here to learn more. If you run a reasonably high traffic blog on a small Linode server like this one, it’s a really good idea to set up an Nginx front-end proxy for your Apache server. It lets you […]

August 9, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Nginx, PHP, Wordpress | No comments

Advanced WordPress: The Basic WordPress Speedup

There are many caching products, plugins and config suggestions for WordPress.org blogs and sites but I’m going to take you through the basic WordPress speedup procedure. This will give you a roughly 280% speedup and the ability to handle high numbers of concurrent visitors with little additional software or complexity. I’m also going to throw […]

June 26, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Nginx, Wordpress | 1 comment

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.