IP Geo Block vs Web-Art Login Shield with reCAPTCHA

The more you install themes and plugins, the more likely your sites will be vulnerable, even if you securely harden your sites. While WordPress.org provides excellent resources, themes and plugins may often get vulnerable due to developers’ human factors such as lack of security awareness, misuse and disuse of the best practices in those resources. This plugin focuses on insights into such developers’ human factors instead of detecting the specific attack vectors after they were disclosed. This brings a smart and powerful methods named as “WP Zero-day Exploit Prevention” and “WP Metadata Exploit Protection“. Combined with those methods and IP address geolocation, you’ll be surprised to find a bunch of malicious or undesirable access blocked in the logs of this plugin after several days of installation. Features Privacy by design: IP address is always encrypted on recording in logs/cache. Moreover, it can be anonymized and restricted on sending to the 3rd parties such as geolocation APIs or whois service. Immigration control: Access to the basic and important entrances into back-end such as wp-comments-post.php, xmlrpc.php, wp-login.php, wp-signup.php, wp-admin/admin.php, wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, wp-admin/admin-post.php will be validated by means of a country code based on IP address. It allows you to configure either whitelist or blacklist to specify the countires, CIDR notation for a range of IP addresses and AS number for a group of IP networks. Zero-day Exploit Prevention: Unlike other security firewalls based on attack patterns (vectors), the original feature “WordPress Zero-day Exploit Prevention” (WP-ZEP) is focused on patterns of vulnerability. It is simple but still smart and strong enough to block any malicious accesses to wp-admin/*.php, plugins/*.php and themes/*.php even from the permitted countries. It will protect your site against certain types of attack such as CSRF, LFI, SQLi, XSS and so on, even if you have some vulnerable plugins and themes in your site. Guard against login attempts: In order to prevent hacking through the login form and XML-RPC by brute-force and the reverse-brute-force attacks, the number of login attempts will be limited per IP address even from the permitted countries. Minimize server load against brute-force attacks: You can configure this plugin as a Must Use Plugins so that this plugin can be loaded prior to regular plugins. It can massively reduce the load on server. Prevent malicious down/uploading: A malicious request such as exposing wp-config.php or uploading malwares via vulnerable plugins/themes can be blocked. Block badly-behaved bots and crawlers: A simple logic may help to reduce the number of rogue bots and crawlers scraping your site. Support of BuddyPress and bbPress: You can configure this plugin so that a registered user can login as a membership from anywhere, while a request such as a new user registration, lost password, creating a new topic and subscribing comment can be blocked by country. It is suitable for BuddyPress and bbPress to help reducing spams. Referrer suppressor for external links: When you click an external hyperlink on admin screens, http referrer will be eliminated to hide a footprint of your site. Multiple source of IP Geolocation databases: MaxMind GeoLite2 free databases (it requires PHP 5.4.0+) and IP2Location LITE databases can be installed in this plugin. Also free Geolocation REST APIs and whois information can be available for audit purposes. Father more, dedicated API class libraries can be installed for CloudFlare and CloudFront as a reverse proxy service. Customizing response: HTTP response code can be selectable as 403 Forbidden to deny access pages, 404 Not Found to hide pages or even 200 OK to redirect to the top page. You can also have a human friendly page (like 404.php) in your parent/child theme template directory to fit your site design. Validation logs: Validation logs for useful information to audit attack patterns can be manageable. Cooperation with full spec security plugin: This plugin is lite enough to be able to cooperate with other full spec security plugin such as Wordfence Security. See this report about page speed performance. Extendability: You can customize the behavior of this plugin via add_filter() with pre-defined filter hook. See various use cases in samples.php bundled within this package. You can also get the extension IP Geo Allow by Dragan. It makes admin screens strictly private with more flexible way than specifying IP addresses. Self blocking prevention and easy rescue: Website owners do not prefer themselves to be blocked. This plugin prevents such a sad thing unless you force it. And futhermore, if such a situation occurs, you can rescue yourself easily. Clean uninstallation: Nothing is left in your precious mySQL database after uninstallation. So you can feel free to install and activate to make a trial of this plugin’s functionality. Attribution This package includes GeoLite2 library distributed by MaxMind, available from MaxMind (it requires PHP 5.4.0+), and also includes IP2Location open source libraries available from IP2Location. Also thanks for providing the following great services and REST APIs for free. http://ip-api.com/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free for non-commercial use) http://geoiplookup.net/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free) https://ipinfo.io/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free) [https://ipapi.com/](https://ipapi.com/ “ipapi – IP Address Lookup and Geolocation API) (IPv4, IPv6 / free, need API key) https://ipdata.co/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free, need API key) https://ipstack.com/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free for registered user, need API key) https://ipinfodb.com/ (IPv4, IPv6 / free for registered user, need API key) Development Development of this plugin is promoted at WordPress-IP-Geo-Block and class libraries to handle geo-location database are developed separately as “add-in”s at WordPress-IP-Geo-API. All contributions will always be welcome. Or visit my development blog. Known issues No image is shown after drag & drop a image in grid view at “Media Library”. For more details, please refer to this ticket at Github. From WordPress 4.5, rel=nofollow had no longer be attached to the links in comment_content. This change prevents to block “Server Side Request Forgeries” (not Cross Site but a malicious internal link in the comment field). WordPress.com Mobile App can’t execute image uploading because of its own authentication system via XMLRPC.

Web-Art Login Shield with reCAPTCHA protects WordPress authentication, Elementor Login widgets and Elementor Forms. It provides optional Google reCAPTCHA v2/v3, IP lockouts, Advanced login URL protection, IP blocking and REST/XML-RPC protection. It preserves WordPress core authentication logic. No ads, author telemetry or external dashboard. All modules are opt-in and disabled by default. Key Features reCAPTCHA v2/v3 selectable v2 checkbox or v3 score-based verification protection for wp-login.php, Elementor Login and Elementor Forms server-side token, action, score and hostname validation where applicable configurable v3 score threshold one active type at a time configuration verification before activation Elementor support protection for Elementor Login and Elementor Pro Forms native Elementor reCAPTCHA fields are skipped to avoid duplication v2 alignment controls login errors and lockouts remain inside the Login widget dynamic content and Elementor popup support Login Protect per-IP failed-attempt counting and temporary lockouts safe concurrent-request handling active-lockout countdown local security event log with bounded retention optional REST API, Application Password and XML-RPC protection independent operation with or without reCAPTCHA Advanced login URL optional custom login endpoint protection of default login routes while preserving required public actions logout and password-link compatibility emergency wp-config.php recovery constant IP allowlists and blocking separate reCAPTCHA allowlist and Login Protect trusted IP list permanent IP blocking for public site requests with HTTP 403 optional IP | reason notes XML-RPC hardening Optional blocking of: pingback.ping pingback.extensions.getPingbacks system.multicall Security Model Protected flows use fail-closed handling. If an enabled check cannot be completed safely, the request is rejected instead of bypassing protection. Login Protect preserves active lockouts and safely handles concurrent requests. Setting Maximum login attempts or Lockout duration to 0 disables lockout enforcement. All modules remain disabled until enabled. Recovery constants are available in wp-config.php for selected modules. External Services This plugin integrates with Google reCAPTCHA v2 and v3, services provided by Google LLC. reCAPTCHA is disabled by default. Google scripts or verification requests are used only after an administrator enables reCAPTCHA or runs a settings-page verification test. Google’s reCAPTCHA JavaScript (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js) may load on protected wp-login.php requests, pages containing protected Elementor widgets or forms, and the settings page during a verification test. Allowlisted visitors bypass frontend loading where applicable. When reCAPTCHA runs, the visitor’s browser connects directly to Google. Google may process browser, device and interaction information and may set the necessary _GRECAPTCHA cookie under its policies. For server-side verification, the plugin sends the token, configured Secret Key and visitor IP address when available to Google’s siteverify endpoint. It does not include usernames, passwords, email addresses or form contents in that request. The plugin sends no telemetry, analytics or usage data to its author. Google policies: https://policies.google.com/privacy https://policies.google.com/terms Privacy Locally stored security data may include: IP addresses, failed-attempt counts and lockout timestamps a username or email associated with an IP lockout recent events containing an IP address, username or email, source, type and timestamp the latest reCAPTCHA configuration or transport error used for diagnostics permanent IP blocklist entries and optional notes Inactive Login Protect entries become eligible for deletion after seven days. Active lockouts remain until expiry. The event log is limited to 30 entries and 30 days. WordPress privacy tools export or erase records matched to the requested email address or associated account. Unmatched IP-only records remain subject to retention and administrator cleanup. Permanent blocklist entries remain until removed by an administrator. Plugin data can be removed during uninstall when uninstall cleanup is enabled. Legal reCAPTCHA is a trademark of Google LLC. Elementor is a trademark of Elementor Ltd. This plugin is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google LLC or Elementor Ltd.