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

Mark-k

Stops user name enumeration and other type of user name and email leakages.
Specifically does the following: 
1. When the site is configured to use pretty permalinks, the plugin will prevent 
 the automatic redirect of usrl which include user ID, like example.com/?author=1, to 
 something like example.com/author/admin which will leak the existence of a user 
 named admin which can be used in further brute force attacks. 
 (This is also know as “user enumeration”).
<ol>
<li>
With the REST API restrict user name related information (actual user name 
and user posts page URL) to only admin users.
</li>
<li>
Preventing authentication failure notices on the login page to disclose 
the existence of user names/user emails resulting from displaying different 
messages hen the user is incorrect and when the password is incorrect. Just 
display the same failure message for whatever is the failure reason.
</li>
<li>
Preventing the reset password mechanism from disclosing user names/user emails 
resulting from displaying different messages when a user/email for which a reset 
is requested exist in the DB, and when it does not. Just display the same message 
for both.
</li>
</ol>
Even with the plugin active, if your theme displays author information while linking 
to author pages this can be used for user name leakage. In this case you should 
think about totally decoupling user and author information with plugins like 
https://wordpress.org/plugins/authors-as-taxonomy/
Another thing that the plugin do not do is to handle leakage resulting from the use 
of gravatar, as this requires a replacement of gravatar functionality itself and 
it is much harder to exploit than the other leakages.
And last leakage hole not covered right now, but might be covered in the future, 
is leakage of information via the sign in process. We leave it for later as most 
installs do not allow people to sign in.
Read more on the plugins main page https://calmpress.org/wordpress-plugins/prevent-user-name-and-email-leakage/
<h4>Documentation</h4>
<h4>Contribute</h4>
Pull Requests, bug reports and/or enhancement suggestions are welcome at https://github.com/calmPress/Authors-as-taxonomy

Prevent user name and email leakage

Stops user name enumeration and other type of user name and email leakages.

Super Simple Account Enumeration Blocker vs Prevent user name and email leakage