Apocalypse Meow
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
About this tool.
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, 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.
