WP Cerber Security v9.8.3 - WordPress Plugin
Defends WordPress against hacker attacks, spam, trojans, and malware.
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Defends WordPress against hacker attacks, spam, trojans, and malware. Mitigates brute-force attacks by limiting the number of login attempts through the login form, XML-RPC / REST API requests, or using auth cookies. Tracks user and bad actors activity with flexible email, mobile and desktop notifications. Stops spammers by using a specialized anti-spam engine. Uses Google reCAPTCHA to protect registration, contact, and comments forms. Restricts access with IP Access Lists. Monitors the website integrity with an advanced malware scanner and integrity checker. Reinforces the security of WordPress with a set of flexible security rules and sophisticated security algorithms.
Features you will love
- Limit login attempts when logging in by IP address or entire subnet.
- Monitors logins made by login forms, XML-RPC requests or auth cookies.
- Permit or restrict access by IP Access Lists with a single IP, IP range or subnet.
- Create Custom login URL (rename wp-login.php).
- Cerber anti-spam engine for protecting contact and registration forms.
- Automatically detects and moves spam comments to trash or denies them completely.
- Manage multiple WP Cerber instances from one dashboard.
- Two-Factor Authentication for WordPress.
- Logs users, bots, hacker and other suspicious activities.
- Security scanner verifies the integrity of WordPress files, plugins and themes.
- Monitors file changes and new files with email notifications and reports.
- Mobile and email notifications with a set of flexible filters.
- Advanced users’ sessions manager
- Protects wp-login.php, wp-signup.php and wp-register.php from attacks.
- Hides wp-admin (dashboard) if a visitor isn’t logged in.
- Immediately blocks an intruder IP when attempting to log in with non-existent or prohibited username.
- Restrict user registration or login with a username matching REGEX patterns.
- Restrict access to WP REST API with your own role-based security rules.
- Block access to WordPress REST API completely.
- Block access to XML-RPC (block access to XML-RPC including Pingbacks and Trackbacks).
- Disable feeds (block access to the RSS, Atom and RDF feeds).
- Restrict access to XML-RPC, REST API and feeds by White IP Access list by an IP address or an IP range.
- Authorized users only mode
- Block a user account.
- Disable automatic redirection to the hidden login page.
- Stop user enumeration (blocks access to author pages and prevents user data leaks via REST API).
- Proactively blocks IP subnet class C.
- Anti-spam: reCAPTCHA to protect WordPress login, register and comment forms.
- reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce & WordPress forms.
- Invisible reCAPTCHA for WordPress comments forms.
- A special Citadel mode for massive brute force attacks.
- Play nice with fail2ban: write failed attempts to the syslog or a custom log file.
- Filter out and inspect activities by IP address, user, username or a particular activity.
- Filter out activities and export them to a CSV file.
- Reporting: get weekly reports to specified email addresses.
- Limit login attempts works on a site/server behind a reverse proxy.
- Be notified via mobile push notifications.
- Trigger and action for the jetFlow.io automation plugin.
- Protection against (DoS) attacks (CVE-2018-6389).
LIMIT LOGIN ATTEMPTS DONE RIGHT
By default, WordPress allows unlimited login attempts through the login form, XML-RPC or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords to be cracked with relative ease via brute force attack.
WP Cerber blocks intruders by IP or subnet from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making brute force attacks or distributed brute force attacks from botnets impossible.
You will be able to create a Black IP Access List or White IP Access List to block or allow logins from a particular IP address, IP address range or a subnet any class (A,B,C).
Moreover, you can create your Custom login page and forget about automatic attacks to the default wp-login.php, which takes your attention and consumes a lot of server resources. If an attacker tries to access wp-login.php they will be blocked and get a 404 Error response.
MALWARE SCANNER
Cerber Security Scanner is a sophisticated and extremely powerful tool that thoroughly scans every folder and inspects every file on a website for traces of malware, trojans, backdoors, changed and new files.
Read more about the malware scanner.
INTEGRITY CHECKER
The scanner checks if all WordPress folders and files match what exist in the official WordPress core repository, compares your plugins and themes with what are in the official WordPress repository and alerts you to any changes. As with scanning free plugins and themes, the scanner scans and verifies commercial plugins and themes that are installed manually.
SCHEDULED SCANS WITH AUTOMATIC FILE RECOVERY
Cerber Security Scanner allows you to configure a schedule for automated recurring scanning easily. Once the schedule is configured the scanner automatically scans the website, deletes malware and recovers modified and infected WordPress files. After every scan, you can get an optional email report with the results of the scan.
Read more about the scheduled scans.
TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) provides an additional layer of security requiring a second factor of identification beyond just a username and password. When 2FA is enabled on a website, it requires a user to provide an additional verification code when signing into the website. This verification code is generated automatically and sent to the user by email.
Read more about Two-Factor Authentication.
LOG, FILTER OUT AND EXPORT ACTIVITIES
WP Cerber tracks time, IP addresses and usernames for successful and failed login attempts, logins, logouts, password changes, blocked IP and actions taken by itself. You can export them to a CSV file.
LIMIT LOGIN ATTEMPTS REINVENTED
You can hide WordPress dashboard (/wp-admin/) when a user isn’t logged in. If a user isn’t logged in and they attempt to access the dashboard by requesting /wp-admin/, WP Cerber will return a 404 Error.
Massive botnet brute force attack? That’s no longer a problem. Citadel mode will automatically be activated for awhile and prevent your site from making further attempts to log in with any username.
CERBER ANTI-SPAM ENGINE
Anti-spam and anti-bot protection for contact, registration, comments and other forms. WP Cerber anti-spam and bot detection engine now protects all forms on a website. No reCAPTCHA is needed. It’s compatible with virtually any form you have. Tested with Gravity Forms, Caldera Forms, HappyForms, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, Fast Secure Contact Form, Contact Form by WPForms.
ANTI-SPAM PROTECTION: INVISIBLE RECAPTCHA FOR WOOCOMMERCE
- WooCommerce login form
- WooCommerce register form
- WooCommerce lost password form
ANTI-SPAM PROTECTION: INVISIBLE RECAPTCHA FOR WORDPRESS
- WordPress login form
- WordPress register form
- WordPress lost password form
- WordPress comment form
INTEGRATION WITH CLOUDFLARE
A special Cloudflare add-on for WP Cerber keeps in sync the list of blocked IP addresses with Cloudflare IP Access Rules.
Stay in compliance with GDPR
How to get full control of personal data to be in compliance with data privacy laws such as GDPR in Europe or CCPA in California.
Recent releases
Release history
- The Activity log and Traffic log CSV exports now report the date range they cover, adding the oldest and newest record timestamps to the export header.
- Activity log and Traffic log CSV exports now stream matching rows in a single unbuffered pass, keeping memory usage flat and avoiding deep-offset scanning, which makes exporting large logs faster and more reliable.
- Activity log and Traffic log exports now send the `X-Accel-Buffering: no` response header so an Nginx proxy in front of PHP-FPM forwards each chunk immediately instead of buffering the whole export, improving time-to-first-byte on large exports.
- Decoding of stored Traffic Inspector request field data is now more robust, consistently treating nullable legacy values, empty values, invalid JSON, and unsupported serialized payloads as an empty array.
- Corrected memory limit handling during Activity log and Traffic log exports, where a numeric limit such as `512` could be applied as bytes instead of megabytes, preventing WP Cerber from raising the available memory and causing exports to stop earlier than expected.
- In the Traffic Inspector Log "Advanced Search", combining the "Any software error" option with other filters could return requests with recorded PHP errors that did not match the other criteria; results now match all selected filters.
- Dashboard links in Activity alert notification emails could carry mismatched query parameters, for example the IP filter receiving an IP-range boundary value, which opened an unrelated filtered view; the links now use the correct values.
- Activity alerts that match on a search string now resolve the user of the logged event instead of falling back to the current administrator, so user-based alert matching behaves correctly.
- Prevented an undefined array key notice in `CRB_Activity::is_modified_since()` when the `data_modified` status value was missing, and corrected an operator-precedence error so a missing modification timestamp is correctly treated as modified.
- Security: Sanitized user-controlled profile display names (first name, last name, and display name) before they are concatenated into `Name ` mail recipient strings, closing an email header injection vector that could add an extra recipient to the two-factor authentication PIN email and to Activity alert notification emails.
- Security: Plugin ownership-change messages on the scanner page are now rendered through WP Cerber's UI layer with contextual output escaping instead of raw HTML, removing a potential stored admin XSS vector from externally supplied plugin ownership metadata provided by the WordPress.org plugin repository.
- Security: Activity log and Traffic log CSV exports now send the `Cache-Control: no-store` response header to prevent a sensitive security-log export from being cached by the browser or an intermediate proxy.
View changelog
- Renamed the "White IP Access List" and "Black IP Access List" terms to "Allowed IP Access List" and "Blocked IP Access List" across the admin UI for clearer access-control terminology.
- Client IP address detection now converts IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses to standard IPv4 notation in proxy and IPv6 environments. ACL entries using mapped IPv6 notation no longer match these normalized client IP addresses.
- Client IP address detection no longer falls back to the `HTTP_CLIENT_IP` header when the `X-Forwarded-For` proxy header is empty or does not contain a valid address.
- The integrity scanner now records detailed database error information in the log when diagnostic logging is enabled in the settings.
- Geolocation data for IPv6 addresses is now cached correctly, so country names appear immediately in the Activity log and Traffic log instead of being re-fetched from the geolocation service on each view, which previously caused extra AJAX requests and a noticeable delay.
- Eliminated the `ERROR 1062` ("Duplicate entry") messages that the IPv6 geolocation caching bug wrote to the server error log on each IPv6 lookup.
- If more than one IPv6 range or IPv6 network defined in IP Access Lists, the Traffic and Activity logs could display comments or labels belonging to a different IPv6 Access List entry, for example showing the label "IP whitelisted" for a request that was actually denied. The logs now show details that match the Access List entry involved.
- Database operations now compatible with WordPress table prefixes starts with a digit, such as `123_`. This resolves a regression introduced by the stricter database operation validation in WP Cerber 9.7.4, where affected sites could fail to run integrity scanner.
View changelog
- Timestamps in the fail2ban log now follow the operating system timezone instead of UTC, so fail2ban can correctly evaluate failed login attempts on servers using a non-UTC timezone.
- Added the constant CERBER_LOG_TIMEZONE to force an explicit timezone identifier for the fail2ban log when automatic detection cannot determine the system timezone.
- Hostnames written to the fail2ban log on failed login attempts are now sanitized to strip log-forging characters, allow only hostname-safe characters, and keep each entry on a single well-formed line.
- WP Cerber's admin interface now uses WordPress's --wp-admin-theme-color custom property instead of hardcoded accent colors, aligning tabs, focus states, and changelog callouts with the selected admin color scheme.
- The Tools / License page now shows localized, non-contradictory notices for empty, malformed, invalid, expired, or temporarily unverifiable license keys.
- Refactored database operations with the new CRB_Database and CRB_Query_Builder classes for more consistent query execution, transactions, safe value quoting, and validation.
- Added the Revalt result/error type as an internal foundation for more consistent operation results, diagnostic chains, and error logging.
- Traffic Inspector now validates decoded JSON request payloads and captures decoding errors for more reliable request logging.
- Sensitive-field masking and request-field preparation now use stricter validation, normalization, and escaping before database insertion.
- Admin notices emitted by WP Cerber are now rendered through crb_purify_message(), which allows only a defined set of HTML elements and attributes.
- The login security setting "Write failed login attempts to the system log file" has been renamed to "Log failed logins in a syslog-style format for automated IP banning tools". Behavior is unchanged.
Frequently asked questions
Is WP Cerber Security GPL licensed?
Can I use WP Cerber Security on multiple websites?
How much does WP Cerber Security cost on GPLCoffee?
Are updates included with WP Cerber Security?
Is WP Cerber Security safe to download?
Auto-updates included
Install it once, update automatically.
The GPLC Connector installs this plugin from your wp-admin and rolls out new versions to your connected sites - up to 25. Included with 12-month and Geek Lifetime plans (plus legacy 6-month).