[Defender Pro] Store Audit Logs from Defender in the Hub

2

A nice feature that would help in recovering from hacks would be if the audit logs from Defender were duplicated and stored in the hub.

Once of my clients had a hack recently where the attacker got in through an administrator’s account with a weak password an did some damage, posted some nonsense and installed some malicious plugins. When I went in to handle the recovery, I discovered that Defender was disabled. My suspicion is that the attacker, disabled it as one of the first things they did so they could handle their business. When I reactivated Defender, there was also not audit log history – so not only did they deactivate it, they cleared the logs before they did to hide the login.

While I’ve added a secondary audit log plugin to the site just in case. A very nice security feature would be if Defender’s audit logs were stored off-site, in the hub, so they could be referenced on a normal basis when doing management in the hub, and during hack recoveries to better understand how the hack happened.

Thanks for all you do, and thanks for all the great products and services!

  • Patrick Freitas
    • FLS

    Hi Saunt Valerian

    I hope you are doing well.

    The main issue with storing the logs on an external database would be that it also stores the username, for example “username edited the page”, and not everyone would be comfortable with this due the legislation like GDPR or similar.

    But I escalated this request to our developers I see the situation you got is a valid point we could maybe find a better way to handle that for example deleting the logs with the WPMU DEV password only similar to what we have on Shipper API or Snapshot when some settings are changed.

    Another possible situation would be integration with any provider to store the logs, for example, Google Sheet integration, which would give you control over choosing between storing data in the external destination or not.

    Best Regards
    Patrick Freitas