I have a client for which I took over maintenance and design from another person. They had the LimitLoginAttempts plugin installed which keeps a total of the failed login attempts on the site and locks-out people after a certain amount (I made this very strict). To combat this initially, I installed a plugin that allows you to change the URL of the wp-admin page – I used a random word which didn’t help and then changed it to a random string of numbers. Surely this would solve it I thought – no bot will bother to find something like 783648792687! No.
The logins spiked at around 400 and are now anywhere from 80-250.
I then thought to install WordFence which allows for 2FA, reCAPTCHA on the login page, firewalls (not activated yet as it adapts to the traffic first apparently) and more detailed login attempt logs – IP, country, WHOIS and bot/human etc. So far today it has locked-out 437 using a specific invalid username which I have now blocked in addition to “admin” that I did previously (the client nor I use “admin” dw).
Nearly every attempt is from a different country to the next and all are marked as human.
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What the hell is going on and why does some entity want to gain access to a cancer blog? I am not too worried as long as they keep getting blocked, but I wonder why this is happening and how I can further try to combat this.
Thanks for any assistance.
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Every website on the internet gets slammed with these requests. They’re just trying to find something to exploit. They’re not picking on your website for any particular reason.
Forgot to mention, installed same limit plugin on another client’s site and has been at 0 for the last week. Also wondered how changing the URL didn’t affect anything.