Protect Directories

I am constantly amazed at how many WordPress and Semiologic users fail to protect their directories, in particular, their plugins directory. These directories are vulnerable to hackers doing some serious damage to your site. If you look at a site's wp-content/plugins directory through your browser, more times than not, you will see their complete list of plugins! This is a security issue and needs to be quickly fixed.

Their are a lot of different ways to protect a directory, using .htaccess rules, but are pretty messy, especially if you don't know what you are doing. But there is a simple way to protect any directory. You just need to create a blank index.html file and drop it into that directory. That is it! Try it and see.

To create a index.html file, open notepad, go to File>save as and save it as >index.html and save as type>All Files. Upload it to your directory. A simple solution that fixes a security issue.