IP Geo Block vs WPScan – WordPress Security Scanner

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.

Please note: This plugin is no longer actively supported for non-enterprise customers. We recommend using Jetpack Protect – a free security plugin for WordPress that leverages the extensive database of WPScan. Jetpack Protect scans your site and warns you about vulnerabilities, keeping your site one step ahead of security threats and malware. The WPScan WordPress security plugin is unique in that it uses its own manually curated WPScan WordPress Vulnerability Database. The vulnerability database has been around since 2014 and is updated on a daily basis by dedicated WordPress security specialists and the community at large. The database includes more than 21,000 known security vulnerabilities. The plugin uses this database to scan for WordPress vulnerabilities, plugin vulnerabilities and theme vulnerabilities, and has the options to schedule automated daily scans and to send email notifications. WPScan has a Free API plan that should be suitable for most WordPress websites, however, also has paid plans for users who may need more API calls. To use the WPScan WordPress Security Plugin you will need to use a free API token by registering here. The Free plan allows 25 API requests per day. View the different available API plans. How many API requests do you need? Our WordPress scanner makes one API request for the WordPress version, one request per installed plugin and one request per installed theme. On average, a WordPress website has 22 installed plugins. The Free plan should cover around 50% of all WordPress websites. Security Checks The WPScan WordPress Security Plugin will also check for other security issues, which do not require an API token, such as: Check for debug.log files Check for wp-config.php backup files Check if XML-RPC is enabled Check for code repository files Check if default secret keys are used Check for exported database files Weak passwords HTTPS enabled What does the plugin do? Scans for known WordPress vulnerabilities, plugin vulnerabilities and theme vulnerabilities; Does additional security checks; Shows an icon on the Admin Toolbar with the total number of security vulnerabilities found; Notifies you by mail when new security vulnerabilities are found. Further Reading WPScan WordPress Vulnerability Database WPScan WordPress Security Scanner WPScan Twitter