Apocalypse Meow vs Website Security Check

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like: Brute-force login-in protection; Customizable password strength requirements; XML-RPC access controls; Account access alerts; Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans); User enumeration prevention; Registration SPAM protection; Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult; Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers; Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information. Knowledge is power! Requirements Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires: WordPress 4.4+. PHP 7.4 or later. PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre. CREATE and DROP MySQL grants. Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported). Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its End of Life. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂 Log Monitoring Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like Fail2Ban or OSSEC to ban users via the firewall. Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to wp-login.php. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools. If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the die() option, requests for ?author=X will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked. Privacy Policy When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors. This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties. Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days. Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)

Website Security Check detects if your WordPress website has vulnerabilities and security flaws. Get a full security report for your website. Check your website with our Free Website Security Check Why is Your WordPress CMS Security Check Important​: 55.9% of vulnerabilities came from plugins. Over 90,978 attacks happening per minute on both big and small WordPress sites 84% of all security vulnerabilities on the internet are the result of Cross-Site Scripting or XSS attacks. Most of the casual bloggers start thinking about site security only after they get into first problems and majority of websites get hacked from entirely preventable issues, like not keeping things updated or using insecure passwords. The majority of hacking attempts are made by bots, and you may be able to prevent hacker bots attacks by hiding your WordPress paths: wp-content, wp-include, plugins, themes, etc. Just by changing the main paths, you may be able to protect your website against things like brute-force attacks, SQL-injection, and requests to your PHP files. The test includes checking for updated plugins, themes and different files and functions which are known to hold security breaches. Is WordPress CMS Vulnerable?​: WordPress is one of the most popular CMS (Content Management System) options on the Internet these days. Around 33% of websites are made with WordPress. Even if WordPress is known for being a secure CMS, sometimes hackers do find vulnerabilities. Most site owners don’t know that the biggest risk comes from the installed plugins and themes. You obviously need to be careful with them, as plugin vulnerabilities represented 55.9% of the known entry points reported by respondents. What happens if wp-login page is visible: wp-login page is certainly one of the most vulnerable pages on your website. If this path is visible means that an authentication path is visible and hackers can perform brute force login attempts. A successful brute force attack can give hackers access to your admin area. An unsuccessful one can slow down your website or crush your server. There are many strategies for dealing with this problem. The simplest one is to hide WordPress login page. What happens if WordPress XML-RPC is visible: XML-RPC is an API that allows anyone to interact with your WordPress website. XML-RPC is also a way to manage your site without having to login manually via the wp-login page. Why hackers try to access your WordPress website using xmlrpc.php file?: Instead of 100 login attempts, the hackers could reduce their login attempts to 10 or less and still try 100 or even thousands of passwords to each request. XML-RPC service is always at high risk for WordPress websites. For your safety, you should disable this service. By disabling xml-rpc you can protect your website from DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, malicious pingback response. If you like Website Security Check please help us and write us a positive review. https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/website-security-check/reviews/#new-post Try also our security plugin: Hide My Wp Ghost Free