Fresh from the Jetpack team at Automattic, today, comes Jetpack Scan. Jetpack Scan scans all the files on your site looking for anything suspicious or malicious and lets you know, or literally fixes it for you with your one-click approval.
This kind of security scanning is very important to me. It’s one of those sleep better at night features, where I know I’m doing all I can do for the safety of my site.
It’s not fun to admit, but I bet in my decade-and-a-half of building WordPress sites, I’ve had half a dozen of them probably have some kind of malicious thing happen. It’s been a long time because I know more, take security way more seriously, and use proper tooling like this to make sure it can’t. But an example is that a malicious actor somehow edits files on your site. One edit to your wp-config.php file could easily take down your site. One edit to your single.php file could put malicious/spammy content on every single blog post. One sketchy plugin can literally do anything to your site. I want to know when any foul play is detected like this.
I’m comforted by the idea that it is Automattic themselves who are checking my site every day and making sure it is clean. Aside from the fact that this is a paid service so they have all that incentive to make sure this does its job, they have the reputation of WordPress itself to uphold here, which is the kind of alignment I like to see in products.
If you’re a user or are familiar with VaultPress, which did backups and security scans, this is an evolution of that. This brings that world into a new dashboard on Jetpack.com (for scans and backup), meaning you can manage all this right from there. Note that this dashboard is for new customers of Jetpack Scan and Backup right now and will soon be available for all existing customers also.
That’s what Jetpack, more broadly, does: it brings powerful abilities of the WordPress.com cloud to your site. For example, backups, CDN hosted assets, instant search, related posts, automatic plugin updates, and more. All of that burden is lifted from your site and done on theirs.
This is also another step toward more à la carte offerings from Jetpack. If you only want this feature and not anything else Jetpack offers, well, you’re in luck. Just like backups, that’s how this feature is sold. Want it? Pay just for it. Don’t want it? Don’t pay for it.
The intro offer (limited time) is $7/month or $70/year. So getting Jetpack Scan right away is your best value.
Their announcement post is out too. High five gang, very nice release.
