ShieldPRO 18.0 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 18.0 for WordPress is a major release packed with few changes and improvements including UI enhancement. We also introduced our exclusive malware scanning engine called MAL{ai} - Artificial Intelligence based Malware scanner.

This guide outlines what have been added/removed, changed, or improved and what fixes we've made.

Firstly, we're going to explain what major changes are made and which options you'd need to review.

New Added Features

For 18.0 release we added

  • [Pro] MAL{ai} - Artificial Intelligence for WordPress Malware Detection

This is our exclusive Artificial Intelligence based Malware scanner. We can now train MAL{ai} on known, existing, malware files along with clean WordPress files, and also include some PHP malware false positives for edge cases.

We've added new scan areas, in particularly the entire /wp-content/ directory, and the WP installation root directory. You can now select these to be scanned - you'll have more results to review, but you'll have more visibility on the files sitting on your site.

  • Added Extra Protection To Security Admin

We've added some protection against adjustments to the WP Default User Role option within the Security Admin system.

  • Security Overview: View as Free or Pro

We added an option in the Security Overview section to switch between free & pro security analysis.

This is available on Shield Free sites only.

This is also an extra protection to Security Admin.

Changes

Change 1: Improved UI

We've made some progress forward in improving the Shield interface.

  • Improved Security Dashboard

We moved Shield logo, notification and other icons above the Search box.

  • Scan Results Table

We've made some improvements on the Scan Results table by adding file type & size information.

Example

Based on MAL{ai}, we added information about the malware status and Malware status report under the file information and malware test from MAL{ai}. We also included a video guide.

Example (malware status)

Example (malware status report)

Additional Improvements

For 18.0 release we've made the following improvements

  • Further UI enhancements in many areas. Most notable are the scan results tables, the activity logs and traffic logs.

  • Improved, more compact plugin layout

    We've received a number of piece of feedback about the latest plugin layout and have restructured some elements to be more compact. This cleanup ensures we waste less space on the screen and can display more content that you need to see.

  • Scan Results display

    We've continued with our tweaking of the Scan Results pages, making them faster to load and easier to read.

  • Plugin code and performance

    We've continued our code clean-up and code enhancements, following our previous major release.

Patch 18.0.6 release

  • Added support for scanning .mo after MAL{ai} malware analysis indicate this is a common injection file type.
  • Improved: ADE Not-Bot checking will only run if the IP module and NotBot options are enabled. Otherwise, no bot assessment will be performed.
  • Improved: Apply some automatic malware scanning exclusions.
  • UI and menu fixes.

For more information on Shield 18.0 release, read this blog article here.