DJ Abrams

Password Sentry (PS) is the must-have application for every membership site! We developed and released Password Sentry in 1999. Password Sentry was groundbreaking as the first application of its kind. Password Sentry continues to be groundbreaking as we grow and re-invent Password Sentry to continue to be the leader in the industry – exceeding anything our competition offers. Password Sentry is an affordable and reliable tool used by thousands of clients to secure and protect thousands of websites from password trading and dictionary / brute force attacks: saving webmasters hundreds or thousands of dollars each year in extra bandwidth, and lost sales. Password Sentry is a free Open Source App.
WordPress (WP) has become a CMS (Content Management System) for many webmasters. In particular, paysite webmasters who offer paid memberships. To that end, we have seen an explosion of apps and WP plugins that enhance the membership functionality of WP. Our plugin is the perfect fit to WP and those plugins. PasswordSentry Plugin hooks into the WP Login to track and log logins to detect and block password sharing and compromised passwords. The PasswordSentry Plugin protects your members and your WP from hackers trying to access your members WP accounts. It also protects your bottom line if you run a paysite by blocking members from sharing their passwords with others. The PasswordSentry Plugin depends on the Password Sentry App: <a href="https://www.password-sentry.com/" title="Password Sentry" rel="nofollow ugc">Password Sentry</a>. The Password Sentry App includes a standalone, web-based control panel (PS AdminCP) to manage Password Sentry App and logged WP users.
o Detect and block password sharing via UserTracking and GeoTracking technology
o Web-based control panel to administer Password Sentry App, and monitor / manage users
o Priority Support [Fee-Based]
o FREE Regular Forum Support
o FREE updates
o Unlimited Domains
o Capability to block logins from specified countries, and/or IP addresses
o Monitor and throttle per-user bandwidth
Before you use this plugin, you must FIRST install the Password Sentry App. Once the Password Sentry App is fully installed and configured, you can then activate and configure the PasswordSentry Plugin. This plugin monitors WP logins, checking for password sharing. If password sharing is detected for a given user, that user is automatically suspended, and you are emailed. Suspended users can either be manually restored via PS AdminCP, or you can setup a cron job to automatically restore suspended users after XX minutes.

PasswordSentry

Secure WordPress by detecting shared passwords, and blocking password sharing. The plugin integrates Password Sentry app into WP to track logins.

Blobfolio

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like:
<ul>
<li>Brute-force login-in protection;</li>
<li>Customizable password strength requirements;</li>
<li>XML-RPC access controls;</li>
<li>Account access alerts;</li>
<li>Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans);</li>
<li>User enumeration prevention;</li>
<li>Registration SPAM protection;</li>
<li>Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult;</li>
<li>Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers;</li>
</ul>
Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information.
Knowledge is power!
<h3>Requirements</h3>
Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires:
<ul>
<li>WordPress 4.4+.</li>
<li>PHP 7.3 or later.</li>
<li>PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre.</li>
<li><code>CREATE</code> and <code>DROP</code> MySQL grants.</li>
<li>Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported).</li>
</ul>
Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its <a href="http://php.net/supported-versions.php" rel="nofollow ugc">End of Life</a>. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂
<h3>Log Monitoring</h3>
Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like <a href="http://www.fail2ban.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">Fail2Ban</a> or <a href="https://ossec.github.io/" rel="nofollow ugc">OSSEC</a> to ban users via the firewall.
Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to <code>wp-login.php</code>. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools.
If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the <code>die()</code> option, requests for <code>?author=X</code> will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked.
<h3>Privacy Policy</h3>
When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors.
This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties.
Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days.
Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)

Apocalypse Meow

Works nicely to protect from brute force logins, and the developer is fantastic!

great protection

A simple, light-weight collection of tools to harden WordPress security and help mitigate common types of attacks.

PasswordSentry vs Apocalypse Meow