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.

Walter Ebert

Removes all WordPress methods from the XML-RPC API to increase security. It does more than just using the <code>xmlrpc_enabled</code> hook, because that is only used “To disable XML-RPC methods that require authentication”.
Activating this plugin will also disable pingbacks, trackbacks, and Really Simple Discovery (RSD), because these rely on XML-RPC.
It works with any webserver, because it does not use the .htaccess file.
<h4>Testing the plugin</h4>
From the command line you can test if the plugin is working correctly using <a href="https://curl.haxx.se/" rel="nofollow ugc">curl</a>. Replace the <code>example.com</code> link to match your website:
<pre><code>curl -d '<?xml version="1.0"?><methodCall><methodName>system.listMethods</methodName><params><param><value><string/></value></param></params></methodCall>' https://example.com/xmlrpc.php
</code></pre>
This should only return the following methods: 
– <code>system.multicall</code> 
– <code>system.listMethods</code> 
– <code>system.getCapabilities</code>

Remove XML-RPC Methods

Remove all WordPress methods from the XML-RPC API to increase security.

Janric Simple Attack Monitor vs Remove XML-RPC Methods