Apocalypse Meow vs XML-RPC Settings

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.)

XML-RPC Settings Configure XML-RPC methods to increase the security of your website: Build-in features could be used for malicious purposes and cannot be disabled by default. Disable GET access XML-RPC API only responds to POST requests. Direct GET access is not needed and can be used to fingerprint websites and use them as XML-RPC zombies in later attacks. Disable system.multicall system.multicall method can be misused for amplification attacks. Disable system.listMethods system.listMethods method can be used for verifying attack scope. Prevent malicious actors from enumerating usernames and credentials. Disable authenticated methods Methods requiring authentication, such as wp.getUsersBlogs, are often used to brute-force your passwords. Pingbacks are a helpful feature to discover back-links to your posts but can be misused for DDoS attacks or allow fingerprinting your WP version. Disable pingbacks Pingbacks are generally safe, but are often used for DDoS attacks via system.multicall. Remove X-Pingback header If you decide to disable pingbacks, it’s a good practice to remove the X-Pingback header return by your posts. Hide WordPress version when verifying pingbacks Pingbacks’ user-agent can reveal your exact WordPress version, even when hidden by other plugins. Hide WordPress version when sending pingbacks Pingbacks’ user-agent can reveal your exact WordPress version, even when hidden by other plugins. Unnecessary XML-RPC API, leave enabled if you are not sure. Disable Demo API Remove demo.sayHello and demo.addTwoNumbers methods, as they are not needed. Disable Blogger API WordPress supports the Blogger XML-RPC API methods. Disable MetaWeblog API WordPress supports the metaWeblog XML-RPC API. Disable MovableType API WordPress supports the MovableType XML-RPC API. If you are using some integrations or WP mobile applications, it might be a good idea to allow XML-RPC only to specific IPs. Allow XML-RPC only for IP comma separated eg. 192.168.10.242, 192.168.10.241 It is possible to hide a message between the allowed methods when system.listMethods is called (not recommended). Add message to XML-RPC methods We are hiring! Check jobs.yourdomains.com