GuardGiant brute force protection

<p>The only plugin with 100% brute force protection that doesn’t lock out genuine users.</p>
<h4>Brute Force Protection</h4>
<p>This security plugin implements an approach used by large websites such as Facebook, Google etc.</p>
<p>When a genuine user makes a successful login to their account using their mobile phone, tablet, or computer GuardGiant starts treating their device as Trusted.</p>
<ul>
<li>Failed login attempts from trusted devices are directed towards ‘Lost Password’ forms rather than being subject to account lockouts or additional counter measures.</li>
<li>Users receive an alert when anyone logs into their account from an unrecognized device or browser.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Stop Hackers</h4>
<p>GuardGiant uses a range of strong counter-measures to limit login attempts from unrecognized devices. The default behaviour is:</p>
<ul>
<li>After 3 failed login attempts from the same unrecognized device, a Google ReCaptcha field is added to the login page. ReCaptcha is a strong counter-measure that is very hard for an automated process to solve.</li>
<li>After 10 failed login attempts a temporary block of 2 minutes is applied to the device/IP address. No login attempts can be made during this time.</li>
<li>Each further failed login attempt increases the block time by another minute. This slows down attacks to the point where they quickly become unviable.</li>
</ul>
<p>All behavior is fully customizable to achieve the level of brute force protection that you require.</p>
<h4>Login History</h4>
<p>A fully featured security log gives you visibility to login attempts on your site.</p>
<ul>
<li>Provides geographic location, device type, IP address and more for each login attempt.</li>
<li>Filter login attempts by Trusted or Unrecognized devices.</li>
<li>Search by IP address or username.</li>
<li>Filter by successful or failed attempts.</li>
<li>Easy to display successful logins from unrecognized devices that could indicate a hacked account.</li>
</ul>
<p>This login history  log should form an essential part of your brute force login protection plan. GDPR compliant.</p>
<h4>Other Login Security Improvements</h4>
<p>This security plugin implements various improvements recommended by the Open Web Application Security Project® (OWASP) to keep your site safe:</p>
<ul>
<li>Obfuscates login errors to stop hackers detecting valid account names.</li>
<li>Option to disable XMLRPC.</li>
<li>And much, much more.</li>
</ul>
<p>This security plugin is exceptionally easy to use no matter what your level of technical expertise.</p>
<p>The default settings are highly optimized, designed to prevent brute force attacks whilst not disturbing genuine users from logging in. Advanced users can fully customize the behavior of this plugin to suit their own environment.</p>
<h4>Login Security Plugin – Background Information</h4>
<p>The most common threat that WordPress site owners face is a password guessing attack known as a brute force attack.<br />
A brute force attack is where an attacker uses a brute force tool (or script) to discover your password by systematically trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols until the correct password is found. A brute force attack will always work eventually, but the problem for the brute force attacker is that it may take many years to do it.</p>
<p>Brute force prevention techniques focus on slowing down these attacks to the point where they become unviable.</p>
<p>Using long and complex passwords (that are not dictionary words) is a good brute force attack prevention method to start with. This greatly increases the time an attacker will need.</p>
<p>A common way to stop brute force attacks is to lock out the WordPress account after a defined number of failed authorization attempts (there are various brute force plugins that do this).<br />
The problem with this approach is that the site administrator ends up with unhappy users who have been locked out, often needing manual intervention to regain access. This is not sustainable or desirable for sites of any size.</p>
<p>The modern approach to brute force prevention is to track the devices that genuine users use to log in, ensuring they are always treated kindly if they forget their password. Unrecognized devices face a progressive but temporary timed lockout.</p>
<h4>Stop Brute Force Attacks</h4>
<p>Periodic monitoring of your security audit log can help you stop brute force attacks.</p>
<p>Here are patterns that indicate a brute force attack or some other account abuse:</p>
<ul>
<li>Failed login attempts using alphabetically sequential usernames or passwords</li>
<li>Multiple different usernames being used by the same IP address</li>
<li>Logins for a single account coming from many different IP addresses</li>
<li>Failed logins at a specific period e.g. every 5 minutes</li>
</ul>


WordPress Brute Force Protection – Stop Brute Force Attacks

The only plugin with 100% brute force protection that doesn't lock out genuine users.

wpformation

<p><strong>Twelve security modules. One lightweight plugin. Zero compromise.</strong></p>
<p>Login Armor is a complete WordPress security stack built for agencies, freelancers and pros who deliver audit-ready sites. No premium tier, no bundled marketing dashboard, no telemetry. Every module runs locally, ships with safe defaults, and stays out of your way.</p>
<p>Stop juggling Wordfence’s bloat, Solid Security’s upsells, and Limit Login Attempts’ gaps — Login Armor delivers twelve independent modules in about one megabyte.</p>
<h4>New in 2.4.0</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Request Firewall</strong> — an optional, 8G-inspired PHP filter that blocks malicious requests (SQL injection, code execution, traversal, XSS, disallowed HTTP methods) before WordPress finishes loading, on Apache, Nginx and LiteSpeed alike. Off by default, it starts in monitor mode and never filters logged-in administrators; every block is logged, aggregated to one incident per IP per hour.</li>
<li><strong>Guided onboarding</strong> — a first-run wizard offers a one-click “safe baseline” that turns on the no-risk essentials, so a beginner is protected in seconds. The same “Apply safe baseline” button stays available any time.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Why Login Armor</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>No upsells, ever.</strong> No “premium” tier, no greyed-out “Pro” buttons. Every feature is GPL.</li>
<li><strong>No external services to sign up for.</strong> No API keys, no remote dashboards, no telemetry. The only outbound calls are opt-in: Have I Been Pwned (breach/password checks), Slack/Discord/webhook (notifications), the keyless ipwho.is API (geolocation), and your own WordPress 7 AI connector.</li>
<li><strong>Built to be invisible.</strong> Sub-megabyte ZIP, lazy-loaded modules, indexed queries — under 2 ms on a normal login flow.</li>
<li><strong>Multisite-aware, PHP 8.1-native, production-grade defaults.</strong> Network-activate a fleet, configure per-site, manage from a complete WP-CLI suite; zero-config gets you 80 percent of the protection.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Twelve independent modules</h4>
<ol>
<li><strong>Hide Login</strong> — Replace wp-login.php with a custom slug; the old URL returns a 404, and a branded pre-activation modal lets you pick or generate the slug and emails it to you so you can’t lock yourself out. Compatible with multisite, reverse proxies and password-recovery flows.</li>
<li><strong>Brute Force Protection</strong> — Cascading lockouts escalating to a 24-hour ban, with subnet blocking and trusted X-Forwarded-For; lostpassword, register, XML-RPC and the REST users endpoint are all gated when an IP is locked, and every lockout surfaces as an incident.</li>
<li><strong>Hardening</strong> — Fifteen one-click toggles across surface reduction, credential hardening, request filtering and account monitoring: disable XML-RPC/pingbacks, the file editor, version exposure, application passwords and author enumeration; block reserved usernames (Unicode-confusable detection); add a login honeypot; get alerted on new administrators.</li>
<li><strong>Two-Factor Authentication</strong> — TOTP, one-time codes by email and printable backup codes, with trusted devices for thirty days, per-role enforcement, a configurable grace period and an email recovery flow when the authenticator is lost.</li>
<li><strong>Detection and Incidents</strong> — A real-time engine groups raw events into six attack patterns, each with a drill-down (timeline, source IPs, target users, severity, UA fingerprint) and one-click actions (reset password, block subnet, mark resolved).</li>
<li><strong>Activity Log</strong> — A compliance-ready, tamper-evident (hash-chained) audit trail of admin actions across seven logger domains, with filtering, CSV export, configurable retention and optional signed webhook forwarding to a SIEM.</li>
<li><strong>Login Page Security Headers</strong> — Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, Permissions-Policy, Referrer-Policy and X-Content-Type-Options on wp-login.php and the lockout page, in two presets with an optional CSP report-uri; baseline headers can optionally extend site-wide.</li>
<li><strong>Breach Check</strong> — Detect logins using a breached password via privacy-preserving k-anonymity against Have I Been Pwned (only a 5-character SHA-1 prefix leaves the server); optional XposedOrNot email lookup, fail-soft so an outage never blocks login.</li>
<li><strong>Password Policy</strong> — Enforce strong, unique passwords at registration, profile update and reset: minimum length and character classes, forbid the username inside the password, optionally reject breached passwords, with optional non-locking expiration nudges.</li>
<li><strong>Session Management</strong> — Idle-timeout logout measured on real page loads, a maximum session lifetime regardless of “remember me”, an optional single-active-device restriction, and a one-click “sign out all other devices”.</li>
<li><strong>IP Geolocation</strong> — Show the attacker’s country on the Incidents and Events tabs; lazy, cached thirty days, capped per page load, private ranges never sent. Keyless ipwho.is by default, swappable for an offline database via a filter.</li>
<li><strong>Request Firewall</strong> — An optional, 8G-inspired PHP filter that blocks malicious query strings, paths, HTTP methods and (opt-in) user-agents/referrers before WordPress loads, on Apache/Nginx/LiteSpeed alike; off by default, starts in monitor mode, never filters admins, skips REST/cron/WP-CLI, with an IP/path allowlist (CIDR). Not scored.</li>
</ol>
<h4>AI Security Briefing (optional)</h4>
<p>Built on the WordPress 7 native AI Client, one click turns your last thirty days of activity into a plain-language verdict, an IP picture and a short list of prioritised actions; “Explain with AI” does the same on a single incident. Minimised mode (anonymised signals) is the default and deep mode is an explicit opt-in. No API key is stored — it uses your own WordPress AI connector, so provider and cost stay yours. It always leads with a deterministic facts snapshot that works with or without AI.</p>
<h4>Plus</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Guided onboarding</strong> — a first-run wizard with a one-click safe baseline (Simple) or manual setup (Advanced); the “Apply safe baseline” button stays available, and upgrading sites never see the wizard.</li>
<li><strong>Security score</strong> — a weighted 0-100 read of your posture with a one-click “next best action”; observability features (geolocation, notifications, the AI assistant) are deliberately not scored.</li>
<li><strong>Conflict detection</strong> — warns when another login-security plugin (Wordfence, Solid Security, Sucuri, All-In-One Security, SecuPress and more) or a cache plugin (with Hide Login on) could clash.</li>
<li><strong>Notifications</strong> — email, Slack, Discord or webhook with SSRF-safe URL validation, severity threshold and rate limiting.</li>
<li><strong>WP-CLI suite</strong> and a <strong>dashboard widget</strong> (14-day sparkline, six headline metrics).</li>
</ul>
<p>GPL forever. PHP 8.1+. WordPress 6.8+. Zero dependencies.</p>
<p><strong>Douze modules de sécurité. Une seule extension légère. Zéro compromis.</strong></p>
<p>Login Armor est une stack complète de sécurité WordPress conçue pour les agences, les freelances et les pros qui livrent des sites prêts à passer un audit. Pas de version premium, pas de tableau de bord marketing intégré, pas de télémétrie. Chaque module tourne en local, embarque des réglages par défaut sécurisés, et reste discret.</p>
<p>Fini de jongler entre la lourdeur de Wordfence, les fenêtres d’upsell de Solid Security et les angles morts de Limit Login Attempts — Login Armor regroupe douze modules indépendants en environ un méga-octet.</p>
<h4>Nouveau en 2.4.0</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Pare-feu de requêtes</strong> : un filtre PHP optionnel, inspiré du pare-feu 8G, qui bloque les requêtes malveillantes (injection SQL, exécution de code, traversée de répertoires, XSS, méthodes HTTP non autorisées) avant même que WordPress ait fini de charger, aussi bien sur Apache que Nginx ou LiteSpeed. Désactivé par défaut, il démarre en mode surveillance et ne filtre jamais les administrateurs connectés ; chaque blocage est journalisé, agrégé en un incident par IP et par heure.</li>
<li><strong>Assistant de configuration</strong> : à la première activation, un assistant propose une « base sûre » en un clic qui active les essentiels sans risque — un débutant est protégé en quelques secondes. Le même bouton « Appliquer la base sûre » reste disponible à tout moment.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Pourquoi Login Armor</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Aucun upsell, jamais.</strong> Pas de niveau « premium », pas de boutons « Pro » grisés. Tout est en GPL.</li>
<li><strong>Aucun service externe à activer.</strong> Pas de clé API, pas de tableau distant, pas de télémétrie. Les seuls appels sortants sont opt-in : Have I Been Pwned (fuites/mots de passe), Slack/Discord/webhook (notifications), l’API sans clé ipwho.is (géolocalisation) et votre propre connecteur IA WordPress 7.</li>
<li><strong>Conçu pour être invisible.</strong> ZIP de moins d’un méga, modules chargés à la demande, requêtes indexées — sous 2 ms sur un flux de connexion normal.</li>
<li><strong>Compatible multisite, natif PHP 8.1, réglages prêts pour la production.</strong> Activation réseau d’une flotte, configuration par site, pilotage via une suite WP-CLI complète ; sans configuration, vous avez déjà 80 % de la protection.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Douze modules indépendants</h4>
<ol>
<li><strong>Masquer la connexion</strong> : remplace wp-login.php par une URL personnalisée (l’ancienne renvoie une 404) ; une modale de pré-activation choisit ou génère le slug et vous l’envoie par e-mail pour éviter tout verrouillage. Compatible multisite, reverse proxies et récupération de mot de passe.</li>
<li><strong>Protection contre la force brute</strong> : verrouillages en cascade montant à un bannissement de 24 h, blocage de sous-réseaux et support X-Forwarded-For ; lostpassword, register, XML-RPC et l’endpoint REST users sont bloqués pour une IP verrouillée, et chaque verrouillage devient un incident.</li>
<li><strong>Renforcement</strong> : quinze bascules en un clic (réduction de surface, identifiants, filtrage des requêtes, surveillance des comptes) — désactiver XML-RPC/pingbacks, l’éditeur de fichiers, l’exposition de version, les mots de passe applicatifs et l’énumération d’auteurs ; bloquer les identifiants réservés (homoglyphes Unicode) ; ajouter un pot de miel ; être alerté à la création d’un administrateur.</li>
<li><strong>Authentification à deux facteurs</strong> : TOTP, codes à usage unique par e-mail et codes de secours imprimables, avec appareils de confiance 30 jours, application par rôle, période de grâce configurable et récupération par e-mail en cas de perte.</li>
<li><strong>Détection et incidents</strong> : un moteur en temps réel regroupe les événements en six patterns d’attaque, chacun avec une vue détaillée (chronologie, IP sources, comptes cibles, sévérité, empreinte UA) et des actions en un clic.</li>
<li><strong>Journal d’activité</strong> : piste d’audit conforme et inviolable (chaîne de hachage) des actions admin sur sept domaines, avec filtrage, export CSV, rétention configurable et transfert webhook signé optionnel vers un SIEM.</li>
<li><strong>En-têtes de sécurité</strong> : CSP, X-Frame-Options, Permissions-Policy, Referrer-Policy et X-Content-Type-Options sur wp-login.php et la page de verrouillage, en deux préréglages avec CSP report-uri optionnel ; les en-têtes de base peuvent s’étendre à tout le site.</li>
<li><strong>Détection de fuites</strong> : repère les connexions avec un mot de passe fuité via k-anonymat sur Have I Been Pwned (seul un préfixe SHA-1 de 5 caractères sort) ; vérification e-mail XposedOrNot optionnelle, fail-soft.</li>
<li><strong>Politique de mot de passe</strong> : impose des mots de passe forts à l’inscription, au profil et à la réinitialisation (longueur, classes de caractères, interdiction de l’identifiant, rejet optionnel des mots de passe fuités), avec expiration optionnelle qui ne verrouille jamais personne dehors.</li>
<li><strong>Gestion des sessions</strong> : déconnexion sur inactivité mesurée sur les vrais chargements, durée de vie maximale indépendante de « se souvenir de moi », limitation optionnelle à un seul appareil actif, et « déconnecter tous les autres appareils » en un clic.</li>
<li><strong>Géolocalisation IP</strong> : affiche le pays des IP attaquantes dans Incidents et Événements ; recherches paresseuses, cache 30 jours, plafonnées par page, plages privées jamais envoyées. ipwho.is sans clé par défaut, base hors ligne possible via un filtre.</li>
<li><strong>Pare-feu de requêtes</strong> : filtre PHP optionnel inspiré du 8G qui bloque chaînes de requête, chemins, méthodes HTTP et (en option) user-agents/referrers malveillants avant le chargement de WordPress, sur Apache/Nginx/LiteSpeed ; désactivé par défaut, démarre en mode surveillance, ne filtre jamais les admins, ignore REST/cron/WP-CLI, allowlist IP/chemins (CIDR). Non noté.</li>
</ol>
<h4>Briefing de sécurité IA (optionnel)</h4>
<p>Bâti sur le client IA natif de WordPress 7, un clic transforme vos trente derniers jours d’activité en un verdict en langage clair, un panorama des IP et une courte liste d’actions prioritaires ; « Expliquer avec l’IA » fait de même sur un incident. Le mode minimisé (signaux anonymisés) est par défaut, le mode approfondi est un opt-in explicite. Aucune clé API stockée : il utilise votre propre connecteur IA WordPress, le coût et le fournisseur restent les vôtres. Il s’ouvre toujours sur un instantané de faits déterministes, utile avec ou sans IA.</p>
<h4>En plus</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Assistant de configuration</strong> : un assistant à la première activation propose une base sûre en un clic (Simple) ou une voie manuelle (Avancée) ; le bouton « Appliquer la base sûre » reste disponible, et les sites en mise à jour ne le voient jamais.</li>
<li><strong>Score de sécurité</strong> : lecture pondérée 0-100 de votre posture avec une action prioritaire en un clic ; les fonctions d’observabilité (géolocalisation, notifications, assistant IA) ne sont pas notées.</li>
<li><strong>Détection de conflits</strong> : alerte quand une autre extension de sécurité axée connexion (Wordfence, Solid Security, Sucuri, All-In-One Security, SecuPress et d’autres) ou un plugin de cache (avec Hide Login actif) peut entrer en conflit.</li>
<li><strong>Notifications</strong> : e-mail, Slack, Discord ou webhook, avec validation d’URL anti-SSRF, seuil de sévérité et rate limiting.</li>
<li><strong>Suite WP-CLI</strong> et <strong>widget Tableau de bord</strong> (sparkline 14 jours, six métriques clés).</li>
</ul>
<h4>Conçu par</h4>
<p>Login Armor est conçu et maintenu par Fabrice Ducarme de <a href="https://wpformation.com/login-armor/" rel="nofollow ugc">WPFormation</a>, expert WordPress français obsédé par les sites propres, rapides et prêts pour l’audit. On l’utilise sur chaque site qu’on livre.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wpformation.com/login-armor/" rel="nofollow ugc">Présentation et fonctionnement de Login Armor</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wpformation.com/securite-wordpress/" rel="nofollow ugc">Guides de sécurité WordPress</a> sur WPFormation</li>
<li><a href="https://wpformation.com/outils/veille-securite/" rel="nofollow ugc">Veille des vulnérabilités WordPress</a> : l’outil de veille sécurité de WPFormation</li>
</ul>
<p>GPL pour toujours. PHP 8.1+. WordPress 6.8+. Zéro dépendance.</p>
<h3>External Services</h3>
<h4>AI Security Briefing (optional)</h4>
<p>The AI Security Briefing and the “Explain with AI” incident analysis are powered by the <strong>WordPress 7 native AI Client</strong> (<code>wp_ai_client_prompt()</code>). When the administrator clicks the analysis button, LoginArmor asks WordPress to send a prompt to the <strong>AI connector that the administrator configured in their own WordPress</strong> (for example OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, depending on the connector). LoginArmor itself stores no API key and contacts no endpoint directly: the request, the provider and the cost are owned by the site’s own AI connector.</p>
<p>Data sent: a text prompt describing the security situation. In <strong>minimised mode (the default)</strong>, only anonymised, non-identifying signals are included (counts, categories, severities, role buckets) – no IP address and no username in clear. In <strong>deep mode</strong> (an explicit, off-by-default opt-in), the prompt additionally includes real IP addresses and event details so the analysis can name specific sources. No data is ever sent unless the administrator clicks the analysis button.</p>
<p>This feature is inactive unless WordPress 7 (or the AI Building Blocks feature plugin) is present with a configured, approved AI connector. The applicable terms and privacy policy are those of the AI provider the administrator chose for their connector; please refer to that provider’s documentation.</p>
<h4>Webhook Notifications (optional)</h4>
<p>When explicitly enabled and configured by the administrator in LoginArmor > Settings > Notifications, the plugin sends incident data to third-party services via webhooks.</p>
<p>Data sent: incident type, severity level, IP address, target username, event count, and site URL.</p>
<p>No data is sent unless the administrator actively enables and configures a notification channel.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Slack</strong> – <a href="https://slack.com/terms-of-service" rel="nofollow ugc">Terms of Service</a> | <a href="https://slack.com/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a></li>
<li><strong>Discord</strong> – <a href="https://discord.com/terms" rel="nofollow ugc">Terms of Service</a> | <a href="https://discord.com/privacy" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a></li>
<li><strong>Custom Webhook URL</strong> – User-configured endpoint (administrator’s responsibility)</li>
</ul>
<h4>Gravatar (Automattic)</h4>
<p>The Activity Log tab uses WordPress core’s <code>get_avatar()</code> function to display user avatars. WordPress may send a hashed email address to <a href="https://gravatar.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Gravatar</a> servers to retrieve avatar images. This is controlled by Settings > Discussion > Avatars.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Gravatar</strong> – <a href="https://automattic.com/tos/" rel="nofollow ugc">Automattic Terms of Service</a> | <a href="https://automattic.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow ugc">Privacy Policy</a></li>
</ul>
<h4>Breach Check – Have I Been Pwned (optional)</h4>
<p>When the administrator explicitly enables the <strong>Breach Check</strong> module (LoginArmor > Settings > Breach  …</p>


Login Armor

Twelve security modules + AI briefing: hide login, request firewall, brute force, 2FA, password policy, sessions, hardening, audit log. No upsells.

WordPress Brute Force Protection – Stop Brute Force Attacks vs Login Armor