WhoKnew.io

WordPress security plugin for contact obfuscation — Stop bots from harvesting your email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Whether you need to hide email addresses in WordPress, deploy honeypot traps that actively catch scrapers, or defend against anti-scraping threats with a built-in Web Application Firewall, WhoKnew Shield provides email harvesting protection with zero configuration required.
<h3>Why stores and businesses need contact security:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Privacy Risk: Scrapers harvest emails for spam databases</li>
<li>Security Threat: Phone scrapers collect numbers for robocalls, SMS spam, and phishing</li>
<li>Fraud Prevention: Address scrapers use your location for junk mail and identity theft</li>
<li>Passive Exposure: Contacts in posts, widgets, and footers are often left unprotected</li>
<li>Bot Evolution: Modern bots can parse basic HTML encoding</li>
<li>Comprehensive Coverage: Every unprotected contact is a potential harvest point</li>
</ul>
WhoKnew Shield uses dual-layer security to help keep your contact information private.
<h4>Free Features (Instant Setup)</h4>
<ul>
<li>Dual-layer obfuscation — HTML entities + CSS reversal + JavaScript protection</li>
<li>Email auto-detection — Write naturally, automatic security everywhere</li>
<li>Click-to-reveal buttons — One click for visitors; blocks automated scrapers</li>
<li>JavaScript-protected links — Email addresses never appear in HTML source code</li>
<li>Multiple contact types — Protect email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses</li>
<li>Shortcodes — <code>[whoknew_shield]</code> for precise control when needed</li>
<li>Strictness controls — 3 detection levels to balance protection vs false positives</li>
<li>Modern admin UI — Clean, intuitive dashboard</li>
<li>No locked features — Everything in free plugin is fully functional</li>
<li>Works with any theme — Page builders, Gutenberg, Classic Editor, WooCommerce</li>
<li>Cache-compatible — Works with WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3 Total Cache, SG Optimizer</li>
</ul>
<h4>Pro Features ($80/year)</h4>
<ul>
<li>Phone protection & address protection — Auto-detect ALL contact types automatically</li>
<li>Web Application Firewall (WAF) — Scraper Trap™ honeypot defense catches bots in action</li>
<li>WhoKnew Intelligence™ Network — Community-powered blacklist with daily-updated threat intelligence from Shield Pro users worldwide</li>
<li>Bot blocker with automatic IP blocking — Block caught scrapers site-wide (1hr to permanent)</li>
<li>Analytics Dashboard — Visual charts, geographic heat maps, threat intelligence</li>
<li>Competitor shortcode support — Supports Email Address Encoder, Neotrendy, Email Encoder Bundle, Antispambot shortcodes</li>
<li>Advanced encryption — Domain-specific rotating keys (changes every 15 minutes)</li>
<li>Custom obfuscation engine — Create your own scraper protection patterns</li>
<li>Geographic tracking — See where attacks originate with country-level data</li>
<li>Custom block pages — Show your message to blocked bots</li>
<li>Email alerts — Get notified when threats are detected</li>
<li>IP whitelist/blacklist — Complete control over access</li>
<li>Priority support — Direct access to our team</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
No coding. Works with any WordPress theme. Set it once, protect everything.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://whoknew.io/plugin/whoknew-shield/" rel="nofollow ugc">Upgrade to Pro →</a> | <a href="https://whoknew.io/whoknew-shield/" rel="nofollow ugc">View Features</a>
<h3>Why Auto-Detection Matters</h3>
Manual shortcode plugins require wrapping every contact individually:
<ul>
<li>Easy to forget contacts in old posts, footer widgets, page builder sections</li>
<li>Manually wrapping every email address or phone number in shortcodes is time-consuming and error-prone</li>
<li>Shield’s auto-detection ensures nothing slips through</li>
</ul>
Write naturally. Shield finds and protects email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses automatically. No gaps. No missed contacts.
<h3>Plugin Switching</h3>
Switch from other email security and anti-spam plugins with no broken pages:
<ul>
<li>Email Address Encoder — <code>[encode]</code> shortcodes work immediately</li>
<li>Email Obfuscation by Neotrendy — <code>[obfuscate_email]</code> supported</li>
<li>Email Encoder Bundle — <code>[eeb_protect_emails]</code>, <code>[eeb_mailto]</code> compatible</li>
<li>Antispambot — All shortcodes work with stronger dual-layer security</li>
</ul>
Just activate Shield Pro and deactivate the old plugin. All existing shortcodes continue working. No find-and-replace needed across your posts.
<h3>Web Application Firewall (WAF) — Pro Feature</h3>
Active security defense beyond passive hiding:
The Pro version includes WAF capabilities through Scraper Trap™ honeypots:
<ul>
<li>Hidden honeypot traps invisible to real users but attractive to bots</li>
<li>Automatic blocking — Caught bots are banned site-wide</li>
<li>Threat intelligence — See attack patterns, geographic origins, bot signatures</li>
<li>Real-time analytics — Visual charts showing when and where attacks happen</li>
<li>Privacy protection — Stop bots before they harvest any email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses</li>
<li>Security monitoring — Know exactly who tried to scrape your site</li>
</ul>
This turns passive protection into active security. You’re not just hiding contacts — you’re catching and blocking malicious bots.
<h3>WhoKnew Intelligence™ — Community Blacklist Network (Pro)</h3>
Collaborative threat protection and anti-spam defense:
Shield Pro users can join the WhoKnew Intelligence™ network to share threat data and download a community-powered blacklist:
<ul>
<li>Daily-updated blocklist — Block known scrapers before they reach your site</li>
<li>Anonymous contribution — Optionally share caught IPs to help protect the community</li>
<li>Live threat intelligence — Benefit from detections across Shield Pro sites</li>
<li>Pre-emptive blocking — Stop bots that attacked other sites before they find yours</li>
<li>Community-powered security — The more sites that join, the stronger the protection</li>
</ul>
When you catch a bot with Scraper Trap™ honeypots, you can anonymously share that IP to protect other Shield users. In return, you get access to a constantly-updated blocklist of confirmed threats.
<h3>External Services</h3>
This plugin displays links in the WordPress admin area that point to whoknew.io, the author’s website. These links are used to provide upgrade information, pricing, and documentation for the optional Pro add-on.
WhoKnew.io (Plugin Author Website)
What it is: whoknew.io is the website of the plugin author (WhoKnew). It hosts the Pro upgrade page, documentation, and support resources for this plugin.
What data is sent and when: The free plugin does not automatically transmit any data to whoknew.io or any other external server. The admin UI contains standard upgrade and documentation links; clicking those links takes you to the whoknew.io website in your browser, subject to normal browser behaviour. No data is collected, tracked, or sent without user action.
Note on the optional Pro add-on: If you separately purchase and activate WhoKnew Shield Pro, that add-on may connect to whoknew.io for licence validation and to download the WhoKnew Intelligence™ community blocklist (an opt-in feature). Those connections are documented in the Pro add-on itself.
<ul>
<li>Terms of Service: https://whoknew.io/terms/</li>
<li>Privacy Policy: https://whoknew.io/privacy/</li>
</ul>
<h3>Third-Party Libraries</h3>
WhoKnew Shield Free does not use any third-party libraries or external services. All code is self-contained within the plugin. No CDN dependencies, no external API calls, no data transmission to third-party servers.
Bundled Data: IANA Root Zone Database
The plugin bundles a static copy of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Root Zone Database (<code>data/iana-tlds.txt</code>). This file is used exclusively for offline TLD validation when email detection is set to Strict mode — it is never loaded, transmitted, or used outside of that context.
<ul>
<li>Source: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt</li>
<li>License: Public domain / IANA (no restrictions on use)</li>
<li>Usage: Bundled locally; no runtime HTTP request is made to IANA</li>
<li>Updates: The file is updated with each plugin release to reflect newly delegated TLDs</li>
</ul>
Privacy by Design: 
– All protection runs locally on your WordPress server 
– No external scripts loaded from CDNs 
– No tracking or analytics sent to external services 
– Complete data sovereignty — everything stays in your database 
– GDPR-friendly architecture with zero external dependencies

WhoKnew Shield — Email, Phone & Address Security

Security plugin blocking spam bots from harvesting email addresses, phone numbers & addresses. Dual-layer anti-spam protection with auto-detection.

Ashok Dhamija

Unsolicited email or email spam is a huge problem that netizens have to face on daily basis. It is estimated that about 90% of all emails sent are spam mails. It was estimated that spam cost businesses to the order of $100 billion in the year 2007 [source: Wikipedia]. Spammers use email harvesting spambots or email spider software to automatically collect email addresses displayed on websites. Therefore, displaying email addresses on your websites can be an invitation to the spammers to collect your email addresses and then start sending you spam mail. At the same, it may be necessary to show your contact email addresses to the genuine visitors to your website. So, what is the solution?
TG Email Protection plugin provides a solution to this issue. Obfuscate or hide the email addresses from the spambots or email spider software, while at the same time displaying the same email addresses to the genuine visitors. Thus, while genuine visitors can see your contact and support email addresses and other email addresses displayed on your websites, the email spider software and spambots cannot automatically harvest your email addresses. For this to happen, obfuscation is used to hide the email addresses included in your WordPress website or blog from spambots and email spider software. This plugin uses different methods to achieve this twin objective in order to fight spam mail and to protect your email addresses. More methods of obfuscating email addresses to conceal them from email spambots may be added to the plugin in future.
How does the plugin obfuscate an email address? In fact, the plugin uses fast and efficient search of the content being delivered, to search for all email addresses in your content and then to obfuscate them on-the-fly. It happens whenever a page is about to be delivered to your visitor. The contents of your database are NOT changed by the plugin. What the plugin does is something like this: when a visitor requests a post or page to be displayed in the browser (by visiting its URL), WordPress extracts the relevant contents from the database; it is at this time that this plugin steps in and filters these contents in a fast and efficient manner, searching and obfuscating the email addresses found in such contents which have already been extracted or copied from the database. Thus, the contents of your database are not changed at all by this plugin. Only the (copy of the) contents being shown to the visitors are shown in a different (obfuscated) manner. While the visitor will still see the email address as usual, it will be obfuscated or hidden from the email spambots and spider software.
Two options to obfuscate email addresses
TG Email Protection plugin offers two different options for obfuscating your email addresses, while at the same time displaying them to the genuine visitors:
<ul>
<li>Select to automatically obfuscate all email addresses shown on your website. When this option is selected, the plugin will obfuscate all email addresses in your content being delivered to the visitors on-the-fly. When this option is selected, you may still separately and individually disable (or enable) obfuscation of email addresses from specific parts of your contents being delivered, such as the main contents, title, excerpts and comments of the post or page, and also from the blog description / information and widget texts. Email addresses in mailto: format are also supported with this option.</li>
<li>Use a shortcode to selectively protect or obfuscate each individual email address that you want. Shortcode can be used only when the above setting for automatic obfuscation of email addresses on the website is NOT selected; otherwise, shortcode will NOT do anything. So, please use shortcode only with this understanding. This is for the obvious reason that where you have already selected the option to obfuscate all email addresses on your website, all email addresses are in any case being obfuscated so that there is no need to use shortcode to obfuscate an individual email address. To use shortcode, use format like this: [tgemail]person@example.com[/tgemail], where person@example.com is the email being obfuscated. Put this shortcode in any of your posts, pages or widgets, wherever you want to display the email address. Please do NOT use shortcode for email in mailto: format.</li>
</ul>
Additional options of changing @ and . (DOT) symbols in email addresses:
TG Email Protection plugin provides you an additional (optional) measure to further obfuscate the email addresses by replacing the @ and . (DOT) symbols in email addresses by something like ‘ (AT) ‘ and ‘ (DOT) ‘ respectively or some other similar text to be chosen by you. While a user can obviously understand what such text stands for, an email spambot may not be able to know that, more so if you use your own custom text which can properly explain its purpose of replacing the @ and . (DOT) symbols in email addresses.
Once installed, the settings of the TG Email Protection plugin would be available for being changed from the ‘TG Email Protection’ option in the ‘Settings’ menu on the admin screen (back-end) of your WordPress website or blog.
Detailed instructions have been provided on the settings / options page of TG Email Protection plugin in the admin area. Each setting has been explained in detail.
You can use this plugin and test the results of obfuscating the email addresses from spambots. In our extensive tests conducted with several email spiders and spambot software, we have found that this plugin is completely successful in hiding the email addresses from the spammers by using innovative and randomized techniques.
This plugin works on all WordPress websites or blogs. It is a very light-weight plugin.
About the plugin and our other plugins:
This plugin has been developed by <a href="http://tilakmarg.com/dr-ashok-dhamija/" rel="nofollow ugc">Ashok Dhamija</a>, who has also developed few other plugins, such as the following:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/tg-facebook-comments/" rel="ugc">TG Facebook Comments</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/tg-copy-protection/" rel="ugc">TG Copy Protection</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/tg-customized-tags/" rel="ugc">TG Customized Tags</a>.</li>
</ul>

TG Email Protection

Protect email addresses from being harvested by spammers and spambots, obfuscating them. Your visitors can still see email addresses.

WhoKnew Shield — Email, Phone & Address Security vs TG Email Protection