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.

Amin Nazemi

Neatma

Protect your website from xmlrpc brute-force attacks,DOS and DDOS attacks, this plugin disables the XML-RPC and trackbacks-pingbacks on your WordPress website.
PLUGIN FEATURES 
(These are options you can enable or disable each one)
<ul>
<li>Disable access to xmlrpc.php file using .httacess file </li>
<li>Automatically change htaccess file permission to read-only (0444)</li>
<li>Disable X-pingback to minimize CPU usage </li>
<li>Disable selected methods from XML-RPC</li>
<li>Remove pingback-ping link from header</li>
<li>Disable trackbacks and pingbacks to avoid spammers and hackers</li>
<li>Rename XML-RPC slug to whatever you want</li>
<li>Black list IPs for XML-RPC</li>
<li>White list IPs for XML-RPC</li>
<li>Some options to speed-up your wordpress website</li>
<li>Disable JSON REST API</li>
<li>Hide WordPress Version</li>
<li>Disable built-in WordPress file editor</li>
<li>Disable wlw manifest</li>
<li>And some other options</li>
</ul>
What is XMLRPC
XML-RPC, or XML Remote Procedure Call is a protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. 
Beginning in WordPress 3.5, XML-RPC is enabled by default. Additionally, the option to disable/enable XML-RPC was removed. For various reasons, site owners may wish to disable this functionality. This plugin provides an easy way to do so.
Why you should disable XML-RPC 
Xmlrpc has two main weaknesses
<ul>
<li>Brute force attacks: 
Attackers try to login to WordPress using xmlrpc.php with as many username/password combinations as they can enter. A method within xmlrpc.php allows the attacker to use a single command (system.multicall) to guess hundreds of passwords. Daniel Cid at Sucuri described it well in October 2015: “With only 3 or 4 HTTP requests, the attackers could try thousands of passwords, bypassing security tools that are designed to look and block brute force attempts.”</li>
<li>Denial of Service Attacks via Pingback: 
Back in 2013, attackers sent Pingback requests through xmlrpc.php of approximately 2500 WordPress sites to “herd (these sites) into a voluntary botnet,” according to Gur Schatz at Incapsula. “This gives any attacker a virtually limitless set of IP addresses to Distribute a Denial of Service attack across a network of over 100 million WordPress sites, without having to compromise them.”</li>
</ul>

Disable XML-RPC-API

The upgrade notice keeps coming back on every screen even after being dismissed. It looks very unprofessional to my clients and is embarrassing for me as a web developer, i would rather disable the plugin and use the code in a function. 

It should be permanently dismissible via a cookie, like for other plugins. It might be ok once, when the plugin is first installed or updated, but after that, it should never appear again. 

Good plugin, but upgrade nag is too annoying

A simple and lightweight plugin to disable XML-RPC API, X-Pingback and pingback-ping in WordPress 3.5+ for a faster and more secure website

Janric Simple Attack Monitor vs Disable XML-RPC-API