keithlunt

Most security plugins try to do everything — firewall, blocking, malware scanning, email alerts — and end up bloated, slow, and full of upsells. Attack Monitor does one thing: it watches your site for common attack patterns and quietly logs them, so you always know what’s being thrown at your site. 
What it detects
Brute force login attempts 
XML-RPC abuse (including system.multicall floods) 
User enumeration via ?author= and the REST API 
Admin area probing by unauthenticated visitors 
Path and plugin scanning (phpinfo.php, .env, phpmyadmin, wp-config.php and more) 
SQL injection attempts in URLs and POST data 
XSS attempts in URLs and POST data 
Comment flooding
What you get
A dashboard widget showing this week’s attacks by category at a glance 
A full log page with day / week / 30-day / all-time views 
A bar chart of attack volume over time 
Top attacking IPs ranked by hit count 
Filterable event log with timestamps, IPs, URLs and detail 
Safe IP whitelist — exclude your own monitoring tools, cron jobs or office IP ranges 
CIDR range support (e.g. 192.168.1.0/24) for the whitelist 
A single lightweight database table — nothing else added to your WordPress installation
Philosophy 
Detection and blocking are separate concerns. This plugin handles detection only, leaving you free to choose how you respond — whether that’s Fail2ban, Cloudflare, a companion blocking plugin, or simply reviewing the data. No firewall rules are added, no requests are blocked or slowed down, and no data is sent anywhere outside your own database. 
Ideal for developers, agencies and site owners who want visibility without handing over control to an all-in-one security suite.

Janric Simple Attack Monitor

Lightweight attack detection for WordPress. Logs brute force, XML-RPC abuse, SQL injection, XSS attempts and more. No bloat, no blocking — just data.

DeveloperWil

Completely disables the XML-RPC API which was introduced in WordPress 3.5 and above which lets remote clients post, upload and edit content.
Notes: 
If you are using the WordPress smart phone app or the Jetpack plugin, please note that they need this service enabled.
If you activate this plugin your WordPress phone app will not be able to connect to your site and Jetpack will not be able to connect to wordpress.com where site visitor data (and other stuff) is stored.
Other plugins and services that use the XML-RPC API will also not function properly.
<h4>Plugin Page</h4>
<a href="https://zeropointdevelopment.com/wordpress-plugins/deactivate-xml-rpc-service-wordpress-plugin/" title="Deactivate XML-RPC Service WordPress Plugin" rel="nofollow ugc">Deactivate XML-RPC</a>

Deactivate XML-RPC Service

Disables the XMP-RPC API service introduced in WordPress 3.5 and above.

Janric Simple Attack Monitor vs Deactivate XML-RPC Service