DawsonyWeb

DawsonyWeb Security Shield protects your WordPress site from comment spam and unauthorised API access.
Comment Protection
<ul>
<li>Master switch to completely disable all comments (form, REST API, XML-RPC, feeds)</li>
<li>Invisible honeypot field to trap bots</li>
<li>Minimum comment length enforcement</li>
<li>Block all links or cap links per comment</li>
<li>Require login to comment</li>
<li>Keyword/phrase blocklist</li>
</ul>
API & REST Hardening
<ul>
<li>Disable XML-RPC entirely (removes X-Pingback header too)</li>
<li>Hide <code>/wp/v2/users</code> endpoint to prevent username harvesting</li>
<li>Require authentication for all REST API requests</li>
<li>Optionally disable the REST API completely</li>
<li>Block author enumeration via <code>/?author=N</code></li>
</ul>
Spam Rules
<ul>
<li>Per-IP comment rate limiting (configurable max and time window)</li>
<li>IP address blocklist — blocked IPs receive a 403 on any front-end request</li>
<li>Rolling activity log (last 200 events)</li>
</ul>

DawsonyWeb – Security Shield

Spam comment protection, comment disabling, XML-RPC hardening, REST API lockdown, user enumeration blocking, and IP blocklisting.

Lars Koudal

cleverplugins

Prevent your WordPress site from participating and being a victim of pingback denial of service attacks. After activation the plugin automatically disables XML-RPC. There’s no need to configure anything.
By disabling the XML-RPC pingback you’ll: 
* lower your server CPU usage 
* prevent malicious scripts from using your site to run pingback denial of service attacks 
* prevent malicious scripts to run denial of service attacks on your site via pingback
From sucuri.net:
<blockquote>
Any WordPress site with Pingback enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites.
</blockquote>
<h4>Learn More</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://wptavern.com/how-to-prevent-wordpress-from-participating-in-pingback-denial-of-service-attacks" rel="nofollow ugc">How To Prevent WordPress From Participating In Pingback Denial of Service Attacks</a> – wptavern.com</li>
<li><a href="http://blog.sucuri.net/2014/03/more-than-162000-wordpress-sites-used-for-distributed-denial-of-service-attack.html" rel="nofollow ugc">More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack</a> – sucuri.net</li>
<li><a href="http://hackguard.com/xmlrpc-php-ping-backs-hackers-denial-service-attacks" rel="nofollow ugc">xmlrpc.php and Pingbacks and Denial of Service Attacks, Oh My!</a> – hackguard.com</li>
</ul>
<h4>Is Your Site Attacking Others?</h4>
Use <a href="http://labs.sucuri.net/?is-my-wordpress-ddosing" rel="nofollow ugc">Sucuri’s WordPress DDOS Scanner</a> to check if your site is DDOS’ing other websites
<h4>Why Not Just Disable XMLRPC Altogether?</h4>
Yes, you can choose to do that, but if you use popular plugins like JetPack (that use XMLRPC) then those plugins will stop working. That is why this small plugin exists.

Remove & Disable XML-RPC Pingback

Great plugin, super easy to install and just sits there doing it's job. Very light as well, so has no effects that I could see, on site speed or memory usage. Can't think of a reason why you wouldn't be using this to be honest. Thanks for developing it!

Just what I needed

Prevent pingback, XML-RPC and denial of service DDOS attacks by disabling the XML-RPC pingback functionality.

DawsonyWeb – Security Shield vs Remove & Disable XML-RPC Pingback