Some idiot at 213.155.4.184 hit all my websites over the last few days trying to login to my blogs. He fired off hundreds of automated requests probing and searching and testing my admin login. Each request had a different password. I use difficult to guess passwords but seeing the attempts was disconcerting.

I went searching and found the Limit Login Attempts plugin. After installing, a new page appears under Settings with a wealth of options:

I’m glad I did install it, it caught the same guy when he hit this blog a few hours later! You should probably install it too.

PS. Matt asked me to explain how I recorded those requests. There is a WordPress plugin that sends an email when a POST request is made but I threw this code into a file and load it with the “auto_prepend_file” directive in my php.ini (saves adding it to every installation of WordPress on my server)

if ( ( isset( $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA ) || !empty( $_POST ) ) && $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ] != '/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron' && $_SERVER[ 'SCRIPT_NAME' ] != '/wp-comments-post.php' && substr( $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ], -10 ) != '/trackback' && substr( $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ], -11 ) != '/trackback/' ) {
    mail( "MYEMAIL@gmail.com", $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] . " POST request: " . $_SERVER[ 'REMOTE_ADDR' ], "URL: {$_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ]}\nPOST: " . print_r( $_POST, 1 ) . "\nCOOKIES: " . print_r( $_COOKIE, 1 ) . "\nHTTP_RAW_POST_DATA: $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA" );
}

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