Stop User Enumeration - Wordpress Plugin

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Stop User Enumeration is a security plugin designed to detect and prevent hackers scanning your site for user login names.

User Enumeration is a type of attack where nefarious parties can probe your website to discover your login name. This is often a pre-cursor to brute-force password attacks. Stop User Enumeration helps block this initial attack and allows you to log IPs launching these attacks to block further attacks in the future.

Tools like WPSCAN are designed for use by ethical hackers and make efforts to find user login names. Ethical hackers ask permission first, this plugin is designed to reduce the tools when used without permission and when used in conjunction with fail2ban can block those attempts at the firewall.

If you are on a VPS or dedicated server, as the attack IP is logged, you can use (optional additional configuration) fail2ban to block the attack directly at your server's firewall, a very powerful solution for VPS owners to stop brute force attacks as well as DDoS attacks.

If you don't have access to install fail2ban ( e.g. on a Shared Host ) you can still use this plugin.

The plugin can stop the user id being leaked by the oEmbed API call.

Since WordPress 4.5 user data can also be obtained by API calls without logging in, this is a WordPress feature, but if you don't need it to get user data, this plugin will restrict and log that too.

Since WordPress 5.5 sitemaps are generated by core WP ( wp-sitemap.xml ) which includes a user/author sitemap that exposes the user id. You can enable / disable this in the plugin settings.

PHP 8.0 compatible

Tested on PHP 8

Features Include

Blocks user enumeration requests by GET or POST
Syslogs a block so Fail2Ban can be used to block an IP
Optionally blocks REST API user requests for non authorized users
Optionally removes author sitemap
Optionally removes author from OEMBED
Optionally removes numbers from comment authors

Releases (51 )

Version	Release Date	Change Log
1.4.5	2022-08-12	remove redundant CSS and fonts
1.4.4	2022-03-17
1.4.3	2022-01-25	Move query arg to init hook to avoid unneccessary warnings Update donation lib
1.4.2	2022-01-24	Fix edge case where reiew / donate become undismissible
1.4.1	2022-01-22	Tidy donation library for build to remove dev dependencies
1.4.0	2021-12-02	Remove freemius library and optional registration Add donation and contribution notices
1.3.33	2021-08-29
1.3.32	2021-08-06	be case insensitive when checking REST API
1.3.31	2021-07-12	= 1.3.30 = Upgrade to version 1.3.30 to disable author site maps - you will need to enable in settings (closes issue #6)
1.3.30	2021-07-02	Upgrade to version 1.3.30 to disable author site maps - you will need to enable in settings (closes issue #6) =
1.3.29	2020-12-04	Minor javascript fix better IP detection for proxies
1.3.28	2020-11-17
1.3.27	2020-10-09	Removed console issue when no comments turned on
1.3.26	2020-09-09	Updated library
1.3.25	2019-12-10	Removed link
1.3.24	2019-11-13	Changed settings page
1.3.23	2019-10-07	Removed donate link
1.3.22	2019-07-04	Moved support link to settings page to reduce menu clutter Updated Freemius library to 2.3.0
1.3.20	2019-02-27	minor improvement
1.3.19	2019-02-25	minor improvement
1.3.18	2018-12-07	minor tweak to work better with 5.0
1.3.17	2018-08-29	changed settings page to stop random metaboxes
1.3.16	2018-07-06	Reworked settings page
1.3.15	2018-01-23	fix to ensure scripts not enqueued unless required
1.3.14	2017-11-17	fix double plugin header
1.3.13	2017-11-14	ability to link to shared host firewall ( fullworks-firewall )
1.3.12	2017-09-27	Resolve some missing files
1.3.11	2017-09-27	Added language localisation for translations Added Spanish translation
1.3.10	2017-08-30	Fixed unused javascript & css in settings page
1.3.9	2017-07-19	Added language settings to allow translation. Sanitized text being written to syslog Closed potential REST API bypass
1.3.8	2017-06-13	Security fix to stop XSS exploit Also coded so should work with PHP 5.3 - although PHP 5.3. has been end of life for over two years it seems some hosts still use this. This is a security risk in its own right and sites using PHP 5.3 should try to upgrade to a supported version of PHP, but this change is for backward compatibility.
1.3.7	2017-01-05	Fix to allow deprecated PHP Version 5.4 to work, as 5.4 seems to still be in common use despite end of life Note this code wont work on PHP 5.3
1.3.6	2017-01-04	Fix PHP error
1.3.5	2017-01-03	full rewrite Changed detection rules to stop a reported bypass Added detection and suppression of REST API calls to user data Added settings page to allow REST API calls or stop system logging as required Added code to remove numbers from comment authors, and setting to turn that off
1.3.4	2016-04-09	Simplify code and deal with undefined request and other argument issues
1.3.3	2015-10-13	Correct issue of undefined index in certain conditions
1.3.2	2015-10-11	Added donate link to plugin listing
1.3.1	2015-10-03
1.3.0	2014-11-19	code improvement from Thomas van der Westen
1.2.9	2014-10-03
1.2.8	2014-08-25	allow comments to use author in url
1.2.7	2014-08-25	bug fix to POST protection
1.2.6	2014-08-25
1.2.5	2014-07-31	Added protection against bypass using null bytes (thanks to vunerbality identification and solution by cvcrcky ) Added protection angainst POST bypass (thanks to vunerbaility identification by urbanadventurer and solution ideas from Ov3rfly and Malivuk )
1.2.4	2014-04-17	Added code to check whether not admin (to stop admin features failing) and changed trailing slash code to trap situation where not posts are found and user is displayed in title
1.2.3	2013-12-02	Fixed bug that stopped export
1.2.2	2013-11-22	Added code to stop bypassing the check when a trailing slash is added
1.2.1	2013-10-26	minor change to handle a specific php issue with a certain version
1.2	2013-10-26	minor change to handle a specific php issue with a certain version
1.1	2013-10-26	added close log corrected call to wp die
1.0	2013-10-25	first release =