Paul Gilzow

After speaking at WordCamp St. Louis 2017 <a href="http://wordpress.tv/2017/03/29/paul-gilzow-access-denied-keeping-yourself-off-an-attackers-radar/" rel="nofollow ugc">http://wordpress.tv/2017/03/29/paul-gilzow-access-denied-keeping-yourself-off-an-attackers-radar/</a>, 
I was asked if I could bundle the code I demo’ed in the talk into a plugin for people who aren’t as comfortable writing their 
own code. As its name implies, it is super simple. There are no settings. The entire codebase is contained in one file, 
and for the most part is about 20 lines of code in length. It is fully commented and I encourage you to look at the code 
to see what it does instead of blindly trusting it.
Specifically, this plugin: 
* removes the redirection of a request from /?author=# to an author’s pretty permalink 
* changes author pretty permalinks to /?author=# 
* changes author feed pretty permalinks to /?author=#&feed= 
* removes author slug property from user response object for user endpoint in the REST API 
* removes overly informative error message when login attempt fails
Rememer: this plugin, by itself, will not protect your site from being compromised. However, it can be an important layer of 
defense when used in a multilayer, defense-in-depth security strategy.
<h3>Help and Support</h3>
Please post questions, request for help to the WordPress plugins forum or 
email <a href="mailto:ssaeb@gilzow.com" rel="nofollow ugc">ssaeb@gilzow.com</a>. Please be sure to include ‘ssaeb’ in the 
subject line.
<h3>TO-DO’s</h3>
Keep adding ways to block enumerations.

Super Simple Account Enumeration Blocker

mattturow

This plugin checks for common user names that don’t exist in the users table. If the submitted user name meets settings criteria the IP will be blocked from the site.
The plugin also has the ability to stop author enumeration by bots.
<h4>Recommended Settings</h4>
There are two different ways to protect your site from user name brute force attacks. The more strict way is to immediately block an IP that attempts to login with a non-existent user name. This can possibly cause issues with websites that have many users or users that may not login very often and forget their user name. It’s most useful for one-person websites.
The less strict way is to have a black list of user names that only a bot would try like “admin” and user nicenames that aren’t logins.
The “Stop Enumeration” setting redirects all attempts to ?author={ID} to the home page of your site. This will stop bots from incrementing through your users and discovering user nicenames.

Double Knot

Stop brute force login attempts by user name.

Super Simple Account Enumeration Blocker vs Double Knot