Apocalypse Meow vs Login Security Solution

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.)

A simple way to lock down login security for multisite and regular WordPress installations. Blocks brute force and dictionary attacks without inconveniencing legitimate users or administrators Tracks IP addresses, usernames, and passwords Monitors logins made by form submissions, XML-RPC requests and auth cookies If a login failure uses data matching a past failure, the plugin slows down response times. The more failures, the longer the delay. This limits attackers ability to effectively probe your site, so they’ll give up and go find an easier target. If an account seems breached, the “user” is immediately logged out and forced to use WordPress’ password reset utility. This prevents any damage from being done and verifies the user’s identity. But if the user is coming in from an IP address they have used in the past, an email is sent to the user making sure it was them logging in. All without intervention by an administrator. Can notify the administrator of attacks and breaches Supports IPv6 Thoroughly examines and enforces password strength. Includes full UTF-8 character set support if PHP’s mbstring extension is enabled. The tests have caught every password dictionary entry I’ve tried. Minimum length (customizable) Doesn’t match blog info Doesn’t match user data Must either have numbers, punctuation, upper and lower case characters or be very long. Note: alphabets with only one case (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) are automatically exempted from the upper/lower case requirement. Non-sequential codepoints Non-sequential keystrokes (custom sequence files can be added) Not in the password dictionary files you’ve provided (if any) Decodes “leet” speak The password/phrase is not found by the dict dictionary program (if available) Blocks discovering user names via the “?author=” query string Password aging (optional) (not recommended) Users need to change password every x days (customizable) Grace period for picking a new password (customizable) Remembers old passwords (quantity is customizable) Administrators can require all users to change their passwords Done via a flag in each user’s database entry No mail is sent, keeping your server off of spam lists Logs out idle sessions (optional) (idle time is customizable) Maintenance mode (optional) Publicly viewable content remains visible Disables logins by all users, except administrators Logs out existing sessions, except administrators Disables posting of comments Useful for maintenance or emergency reasons This is separate from WordPress’ maintenance mode Prevents information disclosures from failed logins Improvements Over Similar WordPress Plugins Multisite network support Monitors authentication cookies for bad user names and hashes Tracks logins from XML-RPC requests Adjusts WordPress’ password policy user interfaces Takes security seriously so the plugin itself does not open your site to SQL, HTML, or header injection vulnerabilities Notice-free code means no information disclosures if display_errors is on and error_reporting includes E_NOTICE Only loads files, actions, and filters needed for enabled options and the page’s context Provides an option to have deactivation remove all of this plugin’s data from the database Uses WordPress’ features rather than fighting or overriding them No advertising, promotions, or beacons Proper internationalization support Clean, documented code Unit tests covering 100% of the main class Internationalized unit tests For reference, the similar plugins include: 6Scan Security Better WP Security Enforce Strong Password Force Strong Passwords Limit Login Attempts Login Lock Login LockDown PMC Lockdown Simple Login Lockdown Wordfence Security WP Login Security WP Login Security 2 Compatibility with Other Plugins Some plugins provide similar functionality. These overlaps can lead to conflicts during program execution. Please read the FAQ! Translations Deutsche, Deutschland (German, Germany) (de_DE) by Christian Foellmann Français, français (French, France) (fr_FR) by mermouy and and Fx Bénard Italiano, Italia (Italian, Italy) (it_IT) by Daniele Passalacqua 日本語, 日本国 (Japanese, Japan) (ja_JP) by motoyamayuki Nederlands, Nederland (Dutch, Netherlands) (nl_NL) by Friso van Wieringen polski, Polska (Polish, Poland) (pl_PL) by Michał Seweryniak miniol Português, Brasil (Portugese, Brazil) (pt_BR) by Valdir Trombini suomi, Suomi (Finnish, Finland) (fi_FI) by Juha Remes Newman101 Source Code, Bugs, and Feature Requests Development of this plugin happens on GitHub. Please submit bug and feature requests, pull requests, wiki entries there. Releases are then squashed and pushed to WordPress’ Plugins SVN repository. This division is necessary due having being chastised that “the Plugins SVN repository is a release system, not a development system.” Old tickets are in the Plugins Trac. Strong, Unique Passwords Are Important Yeah, creating, storing/remembering, and using a different, strong password for each site you use is a hassle. But it is absolutely necessary. Password lists get stolen on a regular basis from big name sites (like Linkedin for example!). Criminals then have unlimited time to decode the passwords. In general, 50% of those passwords are so weak they get figured out in a matter of seconds. Plus there are computers on the Internet dedicated to pounding the sites with login attempts, hoping to get lucky. Many people use the same password for multiple sites. Once an attacker figures out your password on one site, they’ll try it on your accounts at other sites. It gets ugly very fast. But don’t despair! There are good, free tools that make doing the right thing a piece of cake. For example: KeePassX, KeePass, or 1Password Securing Your WordPress Site is Important You’re probably thinking “There’s nothing valuable on my website. No one will bother breaking into it.” What you need to realize is that attackers are going after your visitors. They put stealth code on your website that pushes malware into your readers’ browsers. According to SophosLabs more than 30,000 websites are infected every day and 80% of those infected sites are legitimate. Eighty-five percent of all malware, including viruses, worms, spyware, adware and Trojans, comes from the web. Today, drive-by downloads have become the top web threat. — Security Threat Report 2012 So if your site does get cracked, not only do you waste hours cleaning up, your reputation gets sullied, security software flags your site as dangerous, and worst of all, you’ve inadvertently helped infect the computers of your clients and friends. Oh, and if the attack involves malware, that malware has probably gotten itself into your computer. Actions login_security_solution_insert_fail login_security_solution_notify_breach login_security_solution_notify_fail login_security_solution_fail_tier_dos Filters The following filters allow customizing email subjects and messages. If either the “subject”or “message” filters in a method returns an empty string, the given method will skip calling wp_mail(). login_security_solution_notify_breach_subject login_security_solution_notify_breach_message login_security_solution_notify_breach_user_subject login_security_solution_notify_breach_user_message login_security_solution_notify_fail_subject login_security_solution_notify_fail_message Unit Tests A thorough set of unit tests are found in the tests directory. The plugin needs to be installed and activated before running the tests. To execute the tests, cd into this plugin’s directory and call phpunit tests Translations can be tested by changing the WPLANG value in wp-config.php. Please note that the tests make extensive use of database transactions. Many tests will be skipped if your wp_options and wp_usermeta tables are not using the InnoDB storage engine. Removal This plugin offers the ability to remove all of this plugin’s settings from your database. Go to WordPress’ “Plugins” admin interface and click the “Settings” link for this plugin. In the “Deactivate” entry, click the “Yes, delete the damn data” button and save the form. Use WordPress’ “Plugins” admin interface to click the “Deactivate” link Remove the login-security-solution directory from the server In the event you didn’t pick the “Yes, delete the damn data” option or you manually deleted the plugin, you can get rid of the settings by running three queries. These queries are exapmles, using the default table name prefix of, wp_. If you have changed your database prefix, adjust the queries accordingly. DROP TABLE wp_login_security_solution_fail; DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE 'login-security-solution%'; DELETE FROM wp_usermeta WHERE meta_key LIKE 'login-security-solution%';= Inspiration and References = Password Research Why passwords have never been weaker — and crackers have never been stronger, Dan Goodin You can never have too many passwords: techniques for evaluating a huge corpus, Joseph Bonneau Analyzing Password Strength, Martin Devillers Consumer Password Worst Practices, Imperva Preventing Brute Force Attacks on your Web Login, Bryan Rite Password Strength, Randall Munroe Technical Info The Extreme UTF-8 Table, infosnel.nl A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation, Seiichi Kawamura and Masanobu Kawashima Password Lists Dazzlepod Password List, Dazzlepod Common Passwords, Fravia The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time, Mark Burnett To Do Provide a user interface to the fail table.