Any "best practices" or advice to prevent your forum from being hacked?

[StephenKay]

I recently implemented a php-based store system on my site, and they had a bunch of instructions and suggestions to "hack-proof" your installation as much as possible.

I was wondering if there were any similar "best-practices" for vBulletin?

[Steve Machol]

Please see this thread on how to make your vBulletin more secure:

http://www.vbulletin.com/go/secure

[StephenKay]

Thanks - just what I was looking for.

[StephenKay]

In the thread that you sent me the link for, is this advice (cannot reply to that thread):

If you are on a shared hosting server, make sure all your vBulletin PHP files are chmod 644

cd /path/to/your/vbulletin
chmod -R 644 *.php

This will protect your files if another account on the server is compromised.

Is this supposed to recurse and do files within sub-directories? Because it didn't seem to work. It did all the files in the top level, but none of the files in the /includes directory, for example.

[Steve Machol]

The -R is the recursive tag. From 'man chmod':

-R, --recursive
change files and directories recursively

If it's not working on your server then I suggest contacting your host about this.