Enhancing WHMCS Security: Additional Measures for a Safer Installation

We recommend moving all writeable directories to a private location in order to prevent web-based access. When you do this, you must also make necessary changes to your file storage settings and the templates cache.

For steps to do this, see Securing Writeable Directories.

We recommend adjusting the permissions for the configuration.php file in your WHMCS root directory. This file contains sensitive data that you can't recover without a backup copy of the file.

Changing the file permissions helps to avoid accidentally overwriting, editing, or deleting the file.

For steps to do this, see Securing the Configuration File.

We recommend moving the crons directory to a private directory above your web root. This will prevent web-based access and help to protect your WHMCS installation.

For steps to do this, see Moving the Crons Directory.

For increased protection, if your staff uses fixed IP addresses, you can restrict access to a specific set of IP addresses. This will help to prevent access by hackers and other malicious users.

For steps to do this, see Restricting Access by IP Address.

Customizing the name of your WHMCS admin directory makes it harder for bots and other malicious users to find the login URL for your WHMCS Admin Area.

For steps to do this, see Renaming the WHMCS Admin Directory.

WHMCS often contains private and sensitive data that passes between WHMCS and end users' browsers. Having a valid SSL certificate that enables the use of HTTPS and encrypted communication is essential for data security.

For steps to do this, see Enabling SSL.

We recommend disabling any unneeded database privileges. WHMCS requires a specific set of permissions for day-to-day use and additional privileges during installation, upgrades, and module activations.

For more information and lists of the required permissions, see Database Privileges.

The vendor directory includes various common libraries that WHMCS uses. To prevent unexpected behavior and other issues, your server should not serve file requests directly from this path.

If your server runs Apache, the included .htaccess file already protects against these problems. If, however, you use a different web server technology, you will need to update your configuration to prohibit serving files directly from the vendor directory.

For steps to do this with NGINX, see Nginx Directory Access Restriction.

In a clickjacking attack, the attacker loads an external page (like the WHMCS Client Area) and attempts to trick the user into granting access to their information. You can prevent this by ensuring that your site always sends the proper Content Security Policy (CSP) frame-ancestors directive response headers.

For steps to do this, see OWASP Clickjacking.

The additional steps that you can take depend on your hosting control panel and server configuration. For example:

• cPanel's Security Best Practices
• OWASP Security Misconfiguration