Movable Type is a popular weblog publishing system that supports a variety of plugins. This article lists some very useful security-oriented plugins that can enhance your blogging experience.

Privacy



Privacy allows you to define "read permissions" for assets in Movable Type (entries, categories and blogs). As a result, readers will first need to authenticate to be able to view the asset. Privacy gives you fine-grained control over who can read your content. The beauty and power of Privacy, however, lies in its extensible nature - plugins can easily be written that adds a new type of authentication to Privacy which can then be used to mark assets as private. This is most useful for organizations that already have a custom authentication in place.


AutoBan



AutoBan is an anti-junk plugin for use with the Apache webserver. It updates a .htaccess file to ban the IP addresses of junk sources. The list is generated from the junk objects stored in MT, providing for automatic aging. The updating is completely automatic. AutoBan is primarily useful for preventing flooding attacks. It also turns out that many junkers rent the same zombies, so even new types of attacks that get past the filters tend to be moderate because old attacks get the sources banned.

AIM OpenID Login



This plugin uses Movable Type’s OpenID Login framework to add a custom tab to the commenter login screen. AIM users and visitors from other AOL properties can log in with their screen name.