I have been getting emails in an attempt at marketing wordpress plugins to alleviate a supposed huge wordpress attack happening.

link here: Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet | Ars Technica

if you are doing it right in the first place your wordpress based sites will not be subject to this attack.

It is based on people who make their default admin login name "admin"

I have for years been changing my admin name to a word and number combination.

if you want to do this in very basic form make it admin95 or similar.

The marketing emails speak of a cheap plugin to stop such an attack. They say even if you have changed your admin login name you are still subject to huge bandwidth loss due to this. I don't see this as much of an issue because every server I got and every wordpress based site I got has always been subject to these sorts of attacks day in and day out. On my servers I just use IP TABLES and block every other country except the USA based IP address range. This won't work for some people who cant do this at the server level or who want traffic from other countries.

I have worked with a programmer to modify and help develop a totally free plugin that can combat repeated admin login attempts.

It is called ecSTATic. The part I participated in developing was the email stats it sends out every day. This program does mainly stats but it also has security functions built in.

Direct link: WordPress › ecSTATic « WordPress Plugins

In your plugin install section simply enter the word ecSTATic in the search box and you can automatically install it. One word of warning, it comes with firefox pre-fetch blocking enabled. This has caused me problems in the past and this is enabled by default, I suggest you disable it from the start in the settings section.

This program when properly setup can and will block repeated login attempts.

I like it because it emails me my website stats every day automatically.

I have no affiliation with this plugin and it is totally free with no upgraded paid version. I even tried to convince the programmer to develop a paid version and allow me to market it for him and he laughed me off. He makes his $$ other ways and is just not interested in the problems that come with such a money making effort due to support issues.

So this plugin is totally free and it rocks.

Hope if you need it and use it, it helps you.

Enjoy.

Bob