Pablumfication

After my initial post about wordpress and mod_security, I decided to have a bit more of a look around to find what rules other people had needed to disable to get it working.

I found a really good post over at Gray.me.uk – Mod security and wordpress the final config which had a few additional rules mentioned, but did not solve the problems I was having initially. So I thought I would draw on what they had posted and what I have learnt to produce a fully working list of rules that need to be disabled in order for WordPress 2.9.1 and mod_security Core Rules 2.0.3 to work together.

Below follows an example vhost file the important elements of it being the LocationMatch tags containing the SecRuleRemovedById.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName pablumfication.co.uk
    ServerAlias www.pablumfication.co.uk

    DocumentRoot /var/www/pablumfication.co.uk
    <Directory />
        Options +FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride FileInfo
    </Directory>

    <LocationMatch "/>
        SecRuleRemoveById 910006 # Google robot activity - Useful in someways but noisy for sites where you want them crawled
        SecRuleRemoveById 960015 # Request Missing an Accept Header -  Allow for Google Reader
    </LocationMatch>

    <LocationMatch "/wp-includes/">
        SecRuleRemoveById 960010 # Request content type is not allowed by policy - Allows for amongst other things spell check to work on admin area
        SecRuleRemoveById 960012 # Require Content-Length to be provided with every POST request - Same as above
    </LocationMatch>

    <LocationMatch "(/wp-admin/|/wp-login.php)">    
        SecRuleRemoveById 950005 # Remote File Access Attempt - This rule probably doesn't need to be disabled by everyone but it stops me putting /etc/ in posts and other such linux paths.
        SecRuleRemoveById 950117 # Remote File Inclusion Attack - Disable to allow http:// to be passed in args
    </LocationMatch>

    <LocationMatch "(/wp-admin/post.php|/wp-admin/options.php|/wp-admin/theme-editor.php|/wp-includes/)">
        SecRuleRemoveById 950006 # System Command Injection - Another rule that probably doesn't need to be disabled by everyone it stops .exe and various other extensions being passed in args.
    </LocationMatch>
</VirtualHost>