1. Introduction

1.1. History

As with many Open Source projects, ẀP fail2ban started as way to scratch a particular itch. I had a dedicated server that was getting some unwelcome attention from various bots, and while it was trivial to configure fail2ban for ssh etc, WordPress was another story. Thus WP fail2ban was born late November 2011.

Since then it’s slowly but steadily accumulated features, and much to my surprise, gained a considerable number of installs (30,000+ at the time of writing) - I really had no idea so many other people would be interested!

Between versions 3.5 and 3.6 there was a bit of a delay. I switched my development environment from Windows 10 [1] to a FreeBSD workstation and a Linux laptop, life then decided to take its turn and get in the way for a bit, all while the shadow of Gutenberg loomed large over the future of WordPress. With the advent of ClassicPress [2] things started to look sunnier, so I dusted off the repo, put together some better documentation, braved the horrors of svn, and in November 2018 released 3.6 as a pseudo 7th anniversary present.

1.1.1. LTS [3] Version

My plan was to retire the 3.x branch, but you know what they say about plans….

It turns out that at least one large hosting provider pre-installs WPf2b in mu-plugins. It’s always great to see your work being used widely, but it would have been even better if they had let me know - I could have tested that combination before releasing version 4.

As a result there will now be a 3.7. This will be the very last version 3 release, it will be tailored to being pre-installed in mu-plugins, and it will be supported indefinitely.

1.2. Future

Version 4 was born from a desire to visualise the things WPf2b was logging; being entirely separate and distinct from the core functionality, adding this as freemium features seemed like a good plan. Time will tell.

This logical separation will continue for all future versions - if you were happy with the way 3.6 worked you’ll be happy with future versions too.

1.3. Features

1.3.1. CloudFlare and Proxy Servers

WPf2b can be configured to work with CloudFlare and other proxy servers. For a brief overview see WP_FAIL2BAN_PROXIES.

1.3.2. Comments

WPf2b can log both successful comments (see WP_FAIL2BAN_LOG_COMMENTS), and unsuccessful comments (see WP_FAIL2BAN_LOG_COMMENTS_EXTRA).

1.3.3. Pingbacks

WPf2b logs failed pingbacks, and can log all pingbacks. For a brief overview see WP_FAIL2BAN_LOG_PINGBACKS.

1.3.4. Spam

WPf2b can log comments marked as spam. See WP_FAIL2BAN_LOG_SPAM.

1.3.5. User Enumeration

WPf2b can block user enumeration. See WP_FAIL2BAN_BLOCK_USER_ENUMERATION.

1.3.6. Work-Arounds for Broken syslogd

WPf2b can be configured to work around most syslogd weirdness. For a brief overview see WP_FAIL2BAN_SYSLOG_SHORT_TAG and WP_FAIL2BAN_HTTP_HOST.

1.3.7. Blocking Users

WPf2b can be configured to short-cut the login process when the username matches a regex. For a brief overview see WP_FAIL2BAN_BLOCKED_USERS.

1.3.8. mu-plugins Support

WPf2b can easily be configured as a must-use plugin.

Footnotes

[1]It took me a while to realise that Microsoft really do want to turn Windows 10 into a toy, but I got there eventually.
[2]In the interests of full disclosure: I’m a Founding Committee Member and at the time of writing, Security Team Lead.
[3]Long-Term Support