ShieldUp – Bad Bots, Scrapers, Attackers vs Stream – Activity Log & Audit Trail

Tired of bad bots, scrapers, attackers and sluggish website performance? By providing real-time monitoring of accessing IPs, HTTP codes, URLs, and user agents, organized analytics, customizable timeline and visualizations, ShieldUp will help you indentify and combat threats like bad bots, scrapers, malicous attackers. Which will improve website security and performance by reducing the load on your server resources for a snappy website and great user experience. Key Features 🛡️ Advanced Security: ShieldUp protects your site from malicious bots, scrapers, attackers and hackers, shielding your website from potential threats. 🚀 Optimized Performance: Improve website speed and user experience by eliminating unnecessary requests from scrapers, bad bots and brute force attackers 🗃️ Comprehensive Data Collection: ShieldUp logs and archive accessing IPs, HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, timestamps, etc. 📊 Detailed Data Insights: ShieldUp will analyze, organize and displays IP data based on IP ranges, request counts, details, offering a comprehensive view of your traffic within user-friendly tables. 📅 Custom Time Period: Select specific time ranges through an intuitive calendar feature for in-depth data analysis. 📈 Visualize Data: Easily visualize traffic trends and patterns with our user-friendly graphs. 🛠️ IP Tools: Helps you with actions like retrieving detailed IP information from DB or third-party tools. 🌐 Cloudflare Integration (Pro): Seamlessly connect your website to Cloudflare, enhancing security and performance even further by leverage Cloudflare’s powerful features. ⚙️ Advanced IP Management (Pro): Take control with a click. Manage IPs and IP ranges effortlessly, with actions like blocking, JavaScript challenges, whitelisting, or remove rules using Cloudflare’s firewall through the plugin. 💼 Centralized IP Database (Pro): Keep all IPs controlled by your WP plugin and Cloudflare in a centralized database for efficient management and tracking. 📝 User Activity Logging (Pro): Maintain detailed logs of all IP controls by users, ensuring accountability and providing a historical record of security actions. 🏆 Priority Support (Pro): Pro members get priority support, so you can expect quick help with any questions or issues. Please Note: Yes, the Pro version is undeniably impressive. However, the free version is really what you need and will get the job done. How it works 1. Installation and Activation Start by downloading and installing the ShieldUp plugin. Once activated, it seamlessly integrates with your WordPress, ready to work its magic. 2. Data Collection ShieldUp starts by collecting crucial data about the traffic to your website. It keeps a record of accessing IPs, including HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, and timestamps. This data is organized into user-friendly tables and presented through interactive graphs, allowing you to gain valuable insights into your website’s traffic patterns. 3. Select, Organize and Display Data You can choose a specific time frame, making it easy to identify which IPs are accessing your site the most. It also groups IPs into /16 and /24 ranges and along with graphical representation helps you visualize trends, spot unusual activity and potential security threats. 4. Cloudflare Integration (Pro) ShieldUp seamlessly integrates with Cloudflare in PRO version, enhancing your website’s security even further. Using the Cloudflare API, you can manage IPs and IP ranges right from your WordPress dashboard. Implement blocks, JavaScript challenges, whitelist entries, or remove rules with just a few clicks. 5. IP Tools & IP Management Each IP listed in the user-friendly interface comes with action buttons, enabling you to ban IPs in your website’s firewall or CloudFlare, retrieve detailed IP information from third-party tools, and perform other custom actions. 6. Enhanced Security ShieldUp employs advanced security measures to protect your website from a wide range of threats. It identifies and blocks malicious bots, scrapers, attackers, and hackers, ensuring that your website remains secure. 7. Optimized Website Performance In addition to security, ShieldUp optimizes your website’s performance. It achieves this by filtering out unnecessary requests from bad bots, scrapers and other unwanted traffic. This optimization reduces the load on your server resources, resulting in a snappy and responsive website and great user experience. Firewalls, What we recommend? One of the best options would be a hardware-type firewall, but we wouldn’t be in this situation if we had one. The next best option for managing HTTP and HTTPS traffic is a cloud-based firewall, such as CloudFlare, especially when it is available for free and offers a wide range of excellent features. In addition to that, we also use CSF for other security solutions and to manage traffic and ports related to services like mail and SSH. So, why do we think CloudFlare is a better solution for HTTP and HTTPS trafic, than “Traditional” Server/Software-Based Firewall (CSF) especially Plugin-Like Firewalls (WordPress Plugins)? Traditional firewalls, while valuable, have limitations when compared to Cloudflare’s robust security and performance capabilities. These firewalls primarily protect your server or website by consuming server resources, leaving them vulnerable to large-scale attacks, among other things. In contrast, Cloudflare operates a global network that defends against threats at the network edge, providing superior DDoS protection and accelerated content delivery. By choosing Cloudflare, you gain a comprehensive, cloud-based solution that strengthens your website’s resilience and speed, effectively surpassing the capabilities of traditional local firewalls when it comes to HTTP and HTTPS trafic. Here are some of the main features of CloudFlare: Global Network Security: Cloudflare operates a vast global network that acts as a protective shield for your website, filtering out malicious traffic and threats before they even reach your server. This distributed approach ensures that attacks are mitigated at the network edge, preserving your server resources. Content Caching: Cloudflare’s caching infrastructure stores copies of your website’s content at data centers around the world. This means visitors experience faster load times as they access cached content from a server nearest to them, reducing server load and improving website responsiveness. Web Application Firewall (WAF): Cloudflare offers a comprehensive Web Application Firewall that can be finely tuned to your specific needs. It provides a robust defense against common web application attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), without the need for additional on-site firewall plugins. IP Control and Access Management: Cloudflare’s firewall allows you to control and manage IP access with precision. You can easily set rules to block or allow specific IPs, IP ranges, or countries, giving you granular control over who can access your website. DDoS Protection: Cloudflare’s network is designed to withstand large-scale DDoS attacks, providing a shield against volumetric threats that would overwhelm on-site firewalls. This ensures uninterrupted website availability. Performance Optimization: Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) optimizes the delivery of your website’s assets, including images, scripts, and stylesheets, resulting in reduced latency and faster load times for your visitors. Scalability and Reliability: Cloudflare’s infrastructure is highly scalable and redundant, ensuring that your website remains available even during traffic spikes or server failures. By integrating Cloudflare with your WordPress site, you not only enhance security but also optimize performance, reduce server load, and simplify IP access control, all while benefiting from Cloudflare’s global network and advanced security features. It’s a comprehensive solution that takes your website’s protection and performance to the next level. This is why we use it on all our websites, including the Pro version of this plugin as well. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use it for your website if you haven’t already, whether you intend to use this plugin or not. Please note that we still use and recommend that you use a ‘Traditional’ server/software-based firewall like CSF, in conjunction with CloudFlare, to cover various security aspects such as traffic/ports for mail, FTP, SSH, etc.

Stream is a complete activity log and audit trail for your WordPress site: see what changed, who changed it, and when. From plugin activations to post edits, login attempts to new user creation, every user and system action is recorded in an audit log built for debugging, security monitoring, and compliance. Every logged action is displayed in an activity stream and organized for easy filtering by User, Role, Context, Action or IP address. Admins can highlight entries in the activity log—such as suspicious user activity—to investigate what’s happening in real time. Stream also lets you configure email alerts and webhooks for integrations like Slack and IFTTT, so your team knows the moment something goes wrong. Stream keeps its own logs healthy too: records are automatically purged on the retention schedule you choose, with batched deletion and orphaned-data cleanup that stay reliable even on very large sites. Stream is also AI-ready: its abilities are exposed through the WordPress Abilities API and MCP Adapter, so AI assistants and other tools can securely query your site’s activity records. For advanced users, Stream supports a network view of all activity records on your Multisite, exclude rules to ignore certain kinds of user activity, and a WP-CLI command for querying records. Stream is free and fully open source — development happens in the open on GitHub, maintained by XWP. With Stream’s powerful activity logging, you’ll have the information you need to responsibly manage your WordPress sites. Built-In Tracking Integrations For Popular Plugins: Advanced Custom Fields bbPress BuddyPress Easy Digital Downloads Gravity Forms Jetpack Two Factor User Switching WooCommerce Yoast SEO Built-In Tracking For Core Actions: Posts Pages Custom Post Types Users Themes Plugins Tags Categories Custom Taxonomies Settings Custom Backgrounds Custom Headers Menus Media Library Widgets Comments Theme Editor WordPress Core Updates Other Noteworthy Features: Multisite view of all activity records on a network Limit who can view user activity records by user role Set exclude rules to ignore certain kinds of user activity Live updates of user activity records in the Stream Export your Activity Stream as a CSV or JSON file WP-CLI command for querying records Configuration Most of the plugin configuration is available under the “Stream” → “Settings” page in the WordPress dashboard. Request IP Address The plugin expects the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable to contain the verified IP address of the current request. On hosting environments with PHP processing behind reverse proxies or CDNs the actual client IP is passed to PHP through request HTTP headers such as X-Forwarded-For and True-Client-IP which can’t be trusted without an additional layer of validation. Update your server configuration to set the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable to the verified client IP address. As a workaround, you can use the wp_stream_client_ip_address filter to adapt the IP address: add_filter( 'wp_stream_client_ip_address', function( $client_ip ) { // Trust the first IP in the X-Forwarded-For header. // ⚠️ Note: This is inherently insecure and can easily be spoofed! if ( ! empty( $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ) ) { $forwarded_ips = explode( ',' $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ); if ( filter_var( $forwarded_ips[0], FILTER_VALIDATE_IP ) ) { return $forwarded_ips[0]; } } return $client_ip; } ); ⚠️ WARNING: The above is an insecure workaround that you should only use when you fully understand what this implies. Relying on any variable with the HTTP_* prefix is prone to spoofing and cannot be trusted! Known Issues We have temporarily disabled the data removal feature through plugin uninstallation, starting with version 3.9.3. We identified a few edge cases that did not behave as expected and we decided that a temporary removal is preferable at this time for such an impactful and irreversible operation. Our team is actively working on refining this feature to ensure it performs optimally and securely. We plan to reintroduce it in a future update with enhanced safeguards. Contribute There are several ways you can get involved to help make Stream better: Report Bugs: If you find a bug, error or other problem, please report it! You can do this by creating a new topic in the plugin forum. Once a developer can verify the bug by reproducing it, they will create an official bug report in GitHub where the bug will be worked on. Translate into Your Language: Use the official plugin translation tool to translate Stream into your language. Suggest New Features: Have an awesome idea? Please share it! Simply create a new topic in the plugin forum to express your thoughts on why the feature should be included and get a discussion going around your idea. Issue Pull Requests: If you’re a developer, the easiest way to get involved is to help out on issues already reported in GitHub. Be sure to check out the contributing guide for developers. Thank you for wanting to make Stream better for everyone! View contributors here.