Joris Le Blansch

I like to use Contact Form 7 on most of my WordPress sites. It’s a powerful form manager that suits all my needs. I don’t like to use external calls to protect the forms from spam submissions though (like reCaptcha or hCaptcha) and don’t want to present a manual captcha to a user (math or other puzzle). Since I couldn’t find a really basic honeypot script that works on most entries, I created one here. Hopefully it’s useful to someone else also.
<h3>Setup</h3>
<ul>
<li>Install the plugin using the regular plugin setup routine or upload the entire apiosys-honeypot-cf7 folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.</li>
<li>Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress, you MUST have Contact Form 7 AND Flamingo installed and enabled.</li>
<li>Add the following shortcodes to your Contact Form 7 forms:</li>
</ul>
[honeypot] – Adds the hidden honeypot field 
[timestamp] – Adds time-based validation
<ul>
<li>Complete the rest of the options which you can find in Admin > Contact > Honeypot. A generally good working set of values is enabled by default there.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What tests are used?</h3>
<ul>
<li>A Honeypot Field</li>
<li>A Checkbox Trap</li>
<li>Time-Based Validation</li>
<li>Email domain Check</li>
<li>Basic Content Analysis</li>
</ul>
<h3>Does it really work?</h3>
It has been tested on several high-traffic WP sites. I see a return of ~ 1 ‰ (i.e. 1 in a thousand) of spam going through. That usually corresponds to humans paid to fill forms or sophisticated bots. Please feel free to contribute to make it even better. You can contribute directly <a href="https://github.com/apio-sys/apiosys-honeypot-cf7" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.

Apio systems – Honeypot for Contact Form 7

Basic Honeypot plugin for Contact Form 7 to drastically reduce spam on form submissions without user interaction.

IniLerm

Advanced IP Blocker is your all-in-one security solution to safeguard your WordPress website from a wide range of threats. This plugin provides a comprehensive suite of tools to automatically detect and block malicious activity, including brute-force attacks, vulnerability scanning, and spam bots. With its intuitive interface, you can easily manage whitelists, blocklists, and view detailed security logs to understand exactly how your site is being protected.
<blockquote>
Important Note on PHP Version: 
 To ensure maximum security and access to all features, we strongly recommend using PHP 8.1 or higher. Some advanced features (like the local MaxMind database or full 2FA management via WP-CLI) require PHP 8.1.
</blockquote>
Key Features: 
* (NEW) Advanced Rules Import/Export: Seamlessly migrate or backup your complex custom security rules across multiple WordPress websites. With full JSON validation, structural deduplication, and “cost-zero” client-side file generation, agency users can clone their perfect firewall setups in seconds. 
* (NEW) Granular JS Challenge Modes: You can now choose exactly how the security challenge behaves. Select “Managed” for ultimate security requiring human interaction (a checkbox), or “Automatic” for an invisible, transparent Proof-of-Work execution that stops bots silently. Apply different modes per module! 
* (NEW) Country Selector Copy/Paste: Say goodbye to manually selecting 50+ countries. You can now instantly copy and paste a raw list of 2-letter country codes directly into Geoblocking, Geo-Challenge, and Whitelist Login fields. 
* (NEW) AIB Cloud Network V3: Upgrade to the next-generation distributed threat intelligence network. The new API V3 provides secure, individual API Keys per site, drastically improving synchronization reliability, threat telemetry, and global network stability. 
* (NEW) Whitelist Login Countries: Take absolute control over administrative access. Easily restrict your WordPress login page and XML-RPC to only allow connections from specific, whitelisted countries, instantly blocking unauthorized foreign login attempts. 
* (IMPROVED) Bulk Import/Export for Blocked IPs & Whitelist: Seamlessly import massive lists of IPs via CSV or manual entry. The system now features a bulletproof “Bulk Import” type, strict duration inheritance, and intelligent conflict resolution. 
* (NEW) Internal Security & Forensics: A complete audit suite solely for WordPress. Track every sensitive event (plugin installs, settings changes, user logins) and monitor your critical files for unauthorized modifications with the integrated File Integrity Monitor. 
* (NEW) Activity Audit Log: Gain complete visibility into what’s happening on your site. Who deactivated a plugin? Who changed a setting? The Audit Log answers these questions with timestamped, immutable records. 
* (NEW) Deep Scan Email Reports: Get a weekly security summary delivered to your inbox, detailing pending updates, vulnerability status, and recent attack trends. 
* Username Blocking & Rules: Gain granular control over login security. Creating Advanced Rules to block, challenge, or score specific usernames (e.g., “admin”, “test”). 
* Enhanced Lockdown Notifications: Distributed Lockdowns (404/403) now fully support Email and Push notifications, ensuring you never miss a critical security event. 
* Improved Logging: New “Endpoint Challenge” event type provides deeper visibility into challenges served during automated lockdowns. 
* Server IP Reputation Check. Instantly audit your web server’s IP address against major blacklists (Spamhaus, AbuseIPDB) to diagnose SEO and email delivery issues. 
* **HTTP Security Headers. Easily configure essential security headers like HSTS, X-Frame-Options, and Permissions-Policy to harden your site against clickjacking, sniffing, and other browser-based attacks. Includes a “Report-Only” mode for CSP. 
* Site Health & Vulnerability Scanner. Audit your WordPress environment instantly. Detects outdated plugins, insecure PHP versions, and checks your installed plugins against a database of 30,000+ known vulnerabilities. 
* **PERFORMANCE BOOST: High-Speed Community Database. Migrated the “Community Defense Network” blocklist to a dedicated, indexed database table. This allows checking thousands of malicious IPs in microseconds with zero impact on site memory usage. 
* **WordPress 6.9 Ready. Fully tested and compatible with the latest WordPress core update. 
* **Community Defense Network. Join forces with other WordPress admins. The plugin now shares anonymous attack data to build a global, real-time blocklist of verified threats. Protect your site with community-powered intelligence. 
* **Auto-Cleaning Logic. Smart expiration handling ensures your blocklists stay fresh and performant, automatically removing stale IPs from both the database and external firewalls (Cloudflare/.htaccess). 
* **Cloud Edge Defense (Cloudflare). Connect your site directly to Cloudflare’s global network. Automatically sync your blocklists to the cloud to stop attackers before they reach your server. Zero server load protection. 
* **Server-Level Firewall (.htaccess). Extreme performance upgrade. Write blocking rules and file hardening protections directly to your .htaccess file. Blocks threats instantly without loading PHP or WordPress. 
* **IMPROVED: Smart Bot Verification. Enhanced logic to correctly identify legitimate traffic from iOS devices (iCloud Private Relay) and social media previews, eliminating false positives while keeping impostors out. 
* **File Hardening. Protect your most sensitive files (<code>wp-config.php</code>, <code>readme.html</code>, <code>.git</code>) at the server level with a single click. 
* AbuseIPDB Integration. Proactively block attackers before they strike. The plugin can now check visitor IPs against AbuseIPDB’s real-time, crowdsourced database of malicious IPs and block those with a high abuse score on their very first request. 
* Edge Firewall Mode! Protect any PHP file or standalone application within your WordPress directory (even if it’s not part of WordPress). Ideal for securing custom scripts, legacy applications, or folders like <code>/scan/</code>. (Requires manual configuration). 
* Advanced Rules Engine! Create powerful, custom security rules with multiple conditions (IP, Country, ASN, URI, User-Agent) and actions (Block, Challenge, or add Threat Score). 
* Known Bot Verification. A powerful new security layer that uses reverse DNS lookups to verify legitimate crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot. This completely neutralizes attackers who try to bypass security rules by faking their User-Agent, assigning high threat scores to impostors. 
* Onboarding Setup Wizard. A brand new step-by-step wizard that guides new users through the essential security configurations (IP whitelisting, WAF, and bot traps) in under a minute, ensuring a strong security posture from day one. 
* Major Refactor: Codebase Modernization. The entire plugin architecture has been refactored into a modern, modular structure. Logic for admin pages, AJAX, actions, and settings is now handled by dedicated classes, making the plugin more stable, performant, and easier to maintain and extend in the future. 
* Advanced IP Spoofing Protection. A zero-trust “Trusted Proxies” system ensures the plugin always identifies the true visitor IP, even behind complex setups like Cloudflare or a custom reverse proxy. It neutralizes attacks that attempt to fake their IP, preventing block evasion and the framing of innocent users. 
* Geo-Challenge. A smarter way to handle traffic from high-risk countries. Instead of a hard block, it presents a quick, invisible JavaScript challenge that stops bots but is seamless for human visitors. This reduces unwanted traffic without affecting potential legitimate users. 
* ENHANCEMENT: Full Bulk-Action Support. IP management is now faster than ever. Both the Whitelist and the Blocked IPs list now support full bulk actions, allowing you to select and remove multiple entries at once, or unblock all IPs with a single click. 
* Endpoint Lockdown Mode: Automatically shields <code>wp-login.php</code> and <code>xmlrpc.php</code> with a JavaScript challenge during sustained distributed attacks, preventing server overload. 
* Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Secure user accounts with industry-standard TOTP authentication, backup codes, role enforcement, and a central admin management dashboard. 
* IP Trust & Threat Scoring System: An intelligent defense that assigns “threat points” to IPs for malicious actions, blocking them only when they reach a configurable score. More accurate and context-aware than simple rules. 
* Attack Signature Engine (Beta): Proactively stops distributed botnet attacks by identifying and blocking the attacker’s “fingerprint” (signature) instead of just individual IPs. 
* Web Application Firewall (WAF): Block malicious requests (SQLi, XSS, etc.) with a customizable ruleset. 
* And much more: Rate Limiting, Country & ASN Blocking (with Spamhaus support), ASN Whitelisting, Push Notifications, Google reCAPTCHA, Honeypots, Active User Session Management, and Full WP-CLI Support.

Advanced IP Blocker

A complete WordPress security firewall: blocks IPs, bots & countries. Includes an intelligent WAF, Threat Scoring, Geo-Challenge, and 2FA.

Apio systems – Honeypot for Contact Form 7 vs Advanced IP Blocker