BitFire Security – Firewall, Malware Scanner, Bot Blocker, Login Protection vs Patchstack – WordPress & Plugins Security

Your Site Deserves Real Protection You built your WordPress site to grow your business, share your ideas, or connect with your community. You shouldn’t have to become a security expert to keep it safe. BitFire stops hackers, bots, and malware automatically so you can focus on what matters: running your site. And when you have a question, a real person on our US-based support team is here to help, 12 hours a day. How BitFire Keeps You Safe Most security plugins wait until something goes wrong and then try to clean up the mess. BitFire works the other way around: it stops threats before they ever reach your site. Think of it like a lock on your front door versus a camera that records a break-in. BitFire is the lock. Our AI-powered scanner watches your files and traffic in real time, catching new threats that other plugins miss because they are still waiting for someone to write a rule for it. “Traditional firewalls allow everything by default and react to known threats. BitFire flips that: it verifies traffic first and only lets the good stuff through.” Key Features What BitFire Does For You (Free) Stops Bots Automatically Spam bots, scrapers, and scanners get blocked before they waste your server resources or fill your forms with junk. No CAPTCHAs, no puzzles for your visitors. Scans for Malware BitFire checks every file on your site against a database of over 20 million known-good files. If something does not belong, you will know about it. Shows You Who is Visiting See every request to your site in real time: where visitors are from, what browser they are using, and whether they are a real person or a bot. No more guessing. Protects Your Login Page Brute-force attacks, password stuffing, and login bots are stopped cold. Your admin area stays locked down. Tells Real People from Fake Browsers BitFire verifies visitors with 99.7% accuracy, 50 times faster than Cloudflare’s challenge pages. Real visitors never notice. Bots get stopped instantly. Blocks Known Bad Actors Over 300,000 known malicious IPs are blocked before they can even connect to your site. What You Get with BitFire Pro Everything in Free, plus the protections that stop even zero-day attacks on vulnerable plugins and themes: Runtime Protection (RASP) BitFire is the only WordPress security plugin with Runtime Application Self Protection. It watches what your plugins and themes are actually doing and stops anything suspicious: A plugin tries to create a secret admin account? Blocked. Malware tries to edit your PHP files? Blocked. A hacked plugin tries to phone home to a malware server? Blocked. Code tries to redirect your visitors to a scam site? Blocked. BitFire has blocked 100% of critical WordPress zero-day vulnerabilities since 2022, with zero new rules required. A+ Rated Web Application Firewall Independent testing by Cloudbric rated BitFire’s WAF at 94% (A+). See how that compares: BitFire [PRO]: 94% (A+) Ninja Firewall [PRO]: 67% (D) WordFence [PRO]: 41% (D) MalCare [PRO]: 34% (F) iThemes Security: 2% (F) Shield Security [PRO]: 2% (F) SiteGround Security: 2% (F) View the full independent test results at Cloudbric Labs AI-Powered Malware Analysis When the scanner finds something suspicious, BitFire’s AI analyzes it in real time to determine if it is actually malicious or just unusual code. Pro users get results in about 2 minutes. Free users can submit files for batch analysis. Automatic Security Headers BitFire learns which domains your site uses (Google Fonts, your CDN, analytics, etc.) and automatically sets up Content Security Policy headers that earn an A+ rating. This protects your visitors from cross-site scripting and redirect attacks without you having to configure a thing. 30 Days of Traffic History Look back through a full month of traffic data to investigate issues, spot patterns, or just understand how your site is being used. Real Human Support This is what makes BitFire different from the big-name security plugins: when you need help, you talk to a real person. Our US-based support team is available 12 hours a day. No ticket queues that take days. No chatbots. No copy-paste answers. Just experienced people who will make sure your site is secure. Whether you need help with setup, have a question about a block, or want someone to look at a suspicious file, we are here. Pricing Free $0 forever. Bot blocking, malware scanning, login protection, and real-time traffic monitoring. Everything you need to stop the vast majority of automated attacks. Pro – Single Site $60/year. Full RASP protection, A+ rated WAF, AI malware analysis, 30-day logs, and priority human support. Pro – Multi-Site Volume Pricing Managing multiple sites? The more you protect, the less you pay: 2-4 sites: $50/site per year 5-9 sites: $45/site per year 10-24 sites: $35/site per year 25-49 sites: $25/site per year 50+ sites: $20/site per year Volume pricing is perfect for freelancers, agencies, and anyone managing WordPress sites for clients. Contact us for volume licensing. How BitFire Compares BitFire vs WordFence WordFence is a solid product with a large team writing custom rules for known vulnerabilities. But there are two things you should know: Free WordFence delays protection by 30 days. When a new vulnerability is found, paying WordFence customers get the fix immediately. Free users wait a full month. If your site is vulnerable, it will almost certainly be attacked before the free patch arrives. WordFence relies on knowing about attacks in advance. With over 10,000 known WordPress vulnerabilities and fewer than 200 signatures, they simply cannot cover everything. BitFire’s RASP does not need to know about an attack in advance. It watches what code is actually doing and stops anything malicious, even brand-new attacks nobody has seen before. Whatever security solution you use – we strongly recommend only using the paid version for all important work. Read the detailed BitFire vs WordFence comparison Why Do Other Plugins Focus So Much on Cleaning Up Malware? Good question. Notice how much other security plugins charge for malware removal and how much of their marketing is about finding infections? A security plugin that does its job well should not need to clean malware off your site very often. If a plugin spends most of its energy on cleanup, that tells you something about how well it prevents attacks in the first place. BitFire focuses on keeping malware off your site so you do not need to pay someone to remove it. Privacy / Monitoring / Data Collection We take your privacy seriously. Here is exactly what BitFire does with data: Traffic inspection. BitFire inspects web traffic to your site to identify threats. Sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers is automatically replaced with redacted in logs. You can add additional fields to filter in the settings. Error reporting. If BitFire encounters a software error, it can send a report to our development team so we can fix it in the next release. No visitor data is included in these reports. Malware hash checking. BitFire sends tiny numeric fingerprints (64-bit hashes) of your files to our hash server to check them against our database of known-good files. For example, a file might hash to the number 812612388126487. We never see your actual file contents, and your hashes are never stored on our servers. Local data storage. All log data and configuration files are stored locally on your server in a hidden, randomly-named directory under wp-content/uploads/. This directory is protected by an .htaccess file and is not accessible from the web. =trunk/views/hashes_v2.html= Changelog == 5.1.5 Bots impersonating crawlers (bing, meta, google, etc) are not blocked for simple unrestricted GET requests Added daily fetch data for supplemental crawler dns / cidr lists Improved server IP address detection for allowing local server loop back calls Added plugin inventory hiding to malware detection capabilities Malware detections for plugins missing valid headers / plugin scripts Malware detections for plugins with random identifiers in them Improved logging of xmlrpc requests – now records list of method names – not raw xml Added ability to allow users to delete / restore entire plugins if they are only malware (not official plugins with strong malware signals) Binary files are excluded from malware diffs now Reduced false positives for SQL injection Bot Control panel links to dashboard filter user agents better AI verdict results are now stored for future reference Fix deprecation warning for http response headers on PHP 8.5 Removed dependency on filter_var extension Added expert opinion check allowing admins to request a review of potential malware samples by BitFire staff 5.1.4 Fixed an issue that could allow some admin-ajax requests to recieve a browser challenge for the logged in admin on first install Added additional filtering to cover unknown authorization values, provider keys, and hexadecimal tokens in log storage Added daily updated list of allowed network ranges for core web and AI crawers Improved chaching of DNS lookups for core web bots Added additional bot telemetry gating for bitfire core enable flag 5.1.3 fixed an issue with bot triage recomendations that could generate fatal errors on some host in a background task 5.1.1 Added traffic percent blocking for large sites to sample blocking behavior before fully commiting Increased free AI usage credits from 10 to 12 Improved bot/browser verification compatibility with ModSecurity Added buttons for allowing traffic on the dashboard Fixed an issue that was blocking obviously malicious bots even when bot whitelist setting was not enabled Added reasonable limit for max malware file size to prevent resource exchaustion on servers with very large files Expanded bot source and threat intel data Older versions could label some woocommerce user-agents that were completely random as Improved detection of when to load wordpress vs when to inspect early Bots can be configured directly from the dahboard by clicking on their link to the bot control page False positives can now have execptions added on the dashboard with a single button click AI Malware change for OpenAI compliance – previous versions will no longer support AI analysis Threat hunter content scanner reduced false positiveso Basic harending (size limits, shape constraints) for inputs, moved some requests to POST Expanded learning to support sites that accept POSTs from off site for validated web browsers Bot triage moves from hourly to every 3 hours Expanded runtime protection to ensure environemnt loaded successfull before registering wordpress hooks Improved malware input tainting tracing which detects additional potential malware, reduced false positives Added an exclude list of allowed files in the root for the malware scanner Bots who have been repeat visitors with an AI recomendation different different than current mode now show up on to_review tab 5.1.0 Reduced false positvies for malware scan Improved AI scan results with greatly reduced false positives Implemented quarantine restore for deleted malware files in case of site breakage with Add quarantine restore in case core files are deleted from malware cleanup using new mu-plugin error handler bitfire.php Improved RASP compatibility with fewer exceptions UI improvements Add quick links to wafer firewall scan and securityheaders.com tests Hardening for bot domain verification Improved UI browser and bot icons Support auto-updating BitFire PRO plugin Improved fallbacks for caching Minor refactoring to improve AI analysis of codebase Added special handling for servers with low available memory (< 10MB) Added support for servers that have getmypid() disabled 5.0.9 Add security posture to settings page Improved bot identification Improved loading order decreases block time Multi-Site support! Few bug fixes Fixed an issue with support for PHP 7.4 Links to header and WAF 3rd party verification checks on settings page Display hardening for malformed malware Fix for header signatures on 32bit systems 5.0.0 New AI-powered malware analysis for suspicious files Reduced Pro pricing to $60/year with volume discounts Improved malware scanner performance and accuracy Updated bot and browser fingerprint databases Improved dashboard and settings UI 4.8.3 Fix an issue that could reset the configuration on upgrade 4.8.2 Improvements to the malware scanning UI Fixes for downloading non-PHP files Additional guards to handle corner cases 4.8.0 Improved malware detection and reduced false positives Added 3 new file hash servers in US, DE, and KR Added support for checking for backups and files that could contain sensitive data New daily/weekly status emails Added daily malware scan scheduling Various stability and configuration improvements 4.7.4 Improved dashboard messaging for IP and user-agent blocking Fixed toggle behavior on the exceptions page Fixed deprecation warnings Fixed an issue that could prevent uploading plugins when bot blocking was enabled 4.7.3 Initial WP-CLI support: review logs, check metrics, manage blocks Configuration file reliability improvements PHP 8.3 compatibility fix 4.7.2 Improved traffic monitoring and logging Added “Fake Browser” detection badges Added DoS protection for rate-limited IPs New traffic filter keywords: BLOCKED, RESTRICTED, ADMIN, LOGINS, and more Added email notifications for server health Performance improvements across the board 4.7.0 Added AI verification framework for block accuracy Reduced server communication timeout for faster responses Additional blocking class types for exclusions PHP 8.4 compatibility Updated Google, Bing, and Cloudflare IP lists 4.6.1 Improved dashboard log searching Fixed a rare memory issue with log writing 4.6 Moved configuration and log storage to a more secure location Added .htaccess protection for data directories Resolved several minor PHP warnings 4.5 Fixed filtering on blocked requests Fixed handling of malformed file uploads Added additional browser support 4.4.9 Major quality and performance improvements Daily report emails Complete rewrite of caching and statistics Full support for cached websites (Cloudflare, etc.) Log up to 30 days and 2 million requests per month 4.0.1 Major overhaul of browser and bot detection Added 180+ browsers and 300+ browser icons Switched to high-performance binary log format Added commercial IP reputation database with 300K+ abusive IPs Simplified user interface

Patchstack is a powerful tool that helps identify security vulnerabilities within your websites’ plugins, themes, and WordPress core. It is powered by the WordPress ecosystem’s most active community of ethical hackers. Patchstack is trusted by leading WordPress experts such as Pagely, Cloudways, GridPane, Plesk, and others! Patchstack is a security plugin for WordPress that finds WP core, plugin and theme vulnerabilities in your websites. The free version includes up to 48-hour early warning for new vulnerabilities found by our security research community. It also allows you to automatically update vulnerable software, manage updates remotely, and get snapshot reports on your sites’ security status. The paid version includes automatic vulnerability protection. Patchstack deploys highly targeted rules on a per-site basis, only when a specific vulnerability is detected on a site. This prevents vulnerable components from being exploited without modifying website code, or impacting site performance or functionality. Patchstack’s paid version includes access to 12,000+ individual protection rules (vPatches). Patchstack paid version also includes other preventive security features, such as 2 factor authentication, WordPress specific hardening rules, a Community IP blocklist for malicious IP addresses, advanced security settings, and custom protection rules. Post-hack cleanups vs attack prevention in WordPress security Unlike the standard approach to WordPress security (malware scanning and infection cleanups), Patchstack is focused on preventing infections in the first place. Thanks to its big WordPress security research community and partnerships with nearly one thousand plugin vendors and developers, Patchstack is regularly among the first to identify new vulnerabilities. Who is Patchstack’s WordPress security plugin for? Patchstack’s vulnerability management works extremely well for: Agencies with WordPress care/maintenance plans for their customers’ websites WooCommerce websites to protect their revenue and customers from attacks Hosting companies that want to deliver highly targeted vulnerability protection easily and at scale Website owners You don’t have to be highly technical to use it. Install the plugin, connect it with the Patchstack App, and stay safe! What features are included in the Patchstack Personal (Free) plan? Patchstack’s Personal plan is a free security service for WordPress that lets you find and manage vulnerabilities in your websites. It includes access to a central security dashboard via the Patchstack web App for more visibility and control over your sites’ security: Be the first to know about new vulnerabilities. Receive notifications if any installed plugins or themes have security issues. Detect the latest security vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins. Detect the latest security vulnerabilities in WordPress themes. Detect the latest security vulnerabilities in WordPress core. Receive real-time alerts via email if any security vulnerabilities are found. Manage core, plugin and theme updates from a single dashboard. [Optional] Enable automatic updates for vulnerable plugins only. Generate snapshot reports about the security status of your website. What features do Patchstack paid subscriptions have? Patchstack’s paid subscriptions include automatic protection for WordPress vulnerabilities, as well as other protection modules. Virtual patching to prevent vulnerable components from being exploited Advanced hardening module for added WordPress security Remote hardening settings (including .httacess, login protection and reCAPTCHA) Community IP Blocklist of known attacker IP addresses All of these features are included in the Developer and Enterprise plans. Additionally, Developer and Enterprise plan users have access to custom protection rule creation, periodical security reports and report scheduling. Personal (Free) plan users can enable these features on a per-site basis for $5 / site per month. Important Resources Patchstack website Help Center Changelog Patchstack Vulnerability Database See what our customers say about our paid plans: “An excellent and valuable service that’s backed by a company that contributes a significant number of resources and money directly back to the WordPress ecosystem.” – John Blackbourn “Patchstack is like CrowdStrike, but for websites!” – Ryan McCue, HumanMade “The service here is superb! And they are always right on it with the best solution to solve the problem or question at hand. The tool itself speaks for itself. I am very satisfied with this project and the service they offer.” – Daniel Canup “This is a security plugin everyone needs to install. The Patchstack team are incredible at what they do. We have been using them for years and have not been disappointed!” – @craniumstudio “We’ve been with Patchstack for a LONG time (even before they were Patchstack). It has always done its job seamlessly and without fail. Ongoing innovation and updates to the Patchstack product mean this plugin is a winner. 5 stars all the way.” – @guapx (*Comparisons are made by evaluating paid versions.) Sucuri vs. Patchstack Wordfence vs. Patchstack Malcare vs. Patchstack Sitelock vs. Patchstack