WP Author Security for WordPress

WP Author Security is a lightweight but powerful plugin to protect against user enumeration attacks on author pages and other places where valid user names can be obtained.

By default, WordPress will display some sensitive information on author pages.

The author page is typically called by requesting the URI https://yourdomain.tld/?author=<id> or with permalinks https://yourdomain.tld/author/<username>.

The page will include (depending on your theme) the full name (first and last name) as well as the username of the author which is used to log in to WordPress.

In some cases, it is not wanted to expose this information to the public. An attacker is able to brute force valid IDs or valid usernames. This information might be used for further attacks like social engineering attacks or log in brute force attacks with gathered usernames.

However, when using the plugin and you disable author pages completely it must be noted that you need to take care that your active theme will not display the author name itself on posts like “Posted by admin” or something like that. This is something the plugin will not handle (at the moment).

By using the extension, you are able to disable the author pages either completely or display them only when the author has at least one published post. When the page is disabled the default 404 error page of the active theme is displayed.

In addition, the plugin will also protect other locations which are commonly used by attackers to gather valid user names. These are:

The REST API for users which will list all users with published posts by default.

https://yourdomain.tld/wp-json/wp/v2/users