Block List Updater vs WP fail2ban Blocklist

Few users are familiar with the comment block list built into WordPress. Located in the WordPress admin area under “Settings”—“Discussion”, that block list for incoming comments accepts values (words) to identify spam by. Additionally to plugins like Antispam Bee in order to fight spam successfully a curated comment block list is recommendable. You can either update the list manually, or utilize a very detailed global comment block list that gets updated on a regular basis. Block List Updater has been developed to keep your comment block list in your WordPress installation up to speed with the curated global list on GitHub. The plugin will check the global comment block list on GitHub multiple times a day. Whenever new anti-spam values have been added to the global list, Block List Updater will read the global list and update your WordPress database accordingly. While the check-up process will run several times a day, the plugin will only update the database when it detects an actual change of the global comment block list on GitHub. Support Community support via the support forums on wordpress.org We don’t handle support via e-mail, Twitter, GitHub issues etc. Contribute Active development of this plugin is handled on GitHub. Pull requests for documented bugs are highly appreciated. If you think you’ve found a bug (e.g. you’re experiencing unexpected behavior), please post at the support forums first. If you want to help us translate this plugin you can do so on WordPress Translate. Credits Author: Sergej Müller Maintainers: pluginkollektiv

There are many plugins that use a database to check for malicious IPs after they connect, and of course fail2ban stops repeated attacks, but what if bad IPs could be blocked before they attack? By working collaboratively – sharing attack data – WP fail2ban Blocklist does exactly that. The Blocklist Network Service (BNS) collects attack data from participating sites, performs some analytical magic, and sends back a list of IPs that are attacking sites now but haven’t yet attacked that site. In other words, each site periodically gets a unique list of IPs to block preemptively. GDPR The BNS doesn’t collect personal data, and bots don’t have rights. That said, the BNS only collects the minimum data required (time, IP, event), and only for IPs that have behaved maliciously. Of course, it is possible that some data is generated by people behaving maliciously, but the BNS has no way to differentiate – and nor should it: an attack is an attack. Freemius To work, the BNS must know: which sites are running the blocklist add-on, which version is in use, and a shared secret for secure communication. Freemius already provides all these, and WP fail2ban already uses Freemius; why reinvent the wheel? Therefore, unlike the core WP fail2ban plugin, you must opt into Freemius for the blocklist to work.