Apocalypse Meow vs Anti-Brute Force, Login Fraud Detector WordPress plugin

Anti-Brute Force, Login Fraud Detector WordPress plugin is a security plugin that detects and blocks malicious IP addresses attempting to log into WordPress sites with real-time intelligence data from Criminal IP. Hackers attempting brute-force attacks on WordPress sites do not use normal IP addresses. Rather, they use VPN, Proxy, Tor, Hosting IP, etc. to avoid tracking. Criminal IP is an IP address-based intelligence search engine platform that scans worldwide IP addresses daily and collects such malicious information. The number of detectable login attempts varies depending on the plan being used by the connected Criminal IP account. Users of the Free membership plan can use up to 500 login IP detections per month for free. Block Login IP Address Options VPN IP – When attempting to log in using a VPN Tor IP – When attempting to log in from a Tor browser Proxy IP – When attempting to log in using Proxy Hosting IP – When attempting to log in from the IP address of a hosting server Additional Features Whitelist: Specific IP addresses can be added to the whitelist to allow login. Login Wait Time: Users who are eventually restricted from logging in can try again after the set login wait time. Blocked IP List: Allows you to view a list of all IP addresses subject to login restrictions. The items that may be seen are as follows. IP address Geographic Information (Country) Reason for Login Restriction (Tor/VPN/Proxy/Hosting) Detected Date and Time Installation Installing the Criminal IP Anti-Brute Force, Login Fraud Detector plug-in is very simple. 1. Go to the ‘Plugin’ menu on the WordPress dashboard. 2. Search ‘Criminal IP’ or ‘Criminal IP Brute Force’ in the search window. 3. Click the ‘Install and activate’ button. 4. When the plugin is activated, an icon with the Criminal IP logo will be displayed on the WordPress dashboard sidebar. Click the icon to go to the dashboard and click the ‘Issue API Key’ button to go to Criminal IP. 5. Create a Criminal IP account, log in, and create an API key in My Page. 6. Copy and paste the issued API key into the ‘Criminal IP API key’ input column on the plugin settings tab. 7. On the Settings tab, set the login limit target and login wait time. Click ‘Save Changes’ to finish setting up the plugin. Please report any new features or bugs of the plugin through Criminal IP’s Customer Support. You can also contact [email protected].

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like: Brute-force login-in protection; Customizable password strength requirements; XML-RPC access controls; Account access alerts; Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans); User enumeration prevention; Registration SPAM protection; Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult; Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers; Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information. Knowledge is power! Requirements Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires: WordPress 4.4+. PHP 7.4 or later. PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre. CREATE and DROP MySQL grants. Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported). Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its End of Life. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂 Log Monitoring Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like Fail2Ban or OSSEC to ban users via the firewall. Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to wp-login.php. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools. If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the die() option, requests for ?author=X will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked. Privacy Policy When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors. This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties. Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days. Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)