#894: Brute Force Attacks Against WordPress XMLRPC

chris — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 11:23:51 GMT

For a few months I have see a lot of requests going to WordPress /xmlrpc.php and wasn't sure why, now it is clear:

Instead of going against wp-login.php (which can be easily blocked or protected via .htaccess) or doing a single attempt against xmlrpc, attackers are leveraging the system.multicall method to attempt to guess hundreds of passwords within just one HTTP request.

https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/brute-force-amplification-attacks-against-wordpress-xmlrpc.html

I'd like to install Stop XML-RPC Attack on all the WordPress site we host, unless anyone has a good reason not to. This plugin simply whitelists the JetPack/Automattic's subnets and blocks all other access to /xmlrpc.php.

I started tracking the abuse a while ago and you can see it and manually address it on ParrotServer like this:

sudo -i
wp-xmlrpc-abuse
IP addresses accessing xmlrpc.php more than twice for the last 1000 lines of each access.log:
      2 46.148.XX.XX
    733 195.62.53.243
    177 195.62.53.243
      2 66.76.XX.XX
dig -x 195.62.53.243 +short
  53-243.static.spheral.ru.
ipdrop 195.62.53.243

But we need to be more pro-active in blocking access or we are going to probably see some compromised sites.

Transition Technology: Ticket Query

#894: Brute Force Attacks Against WordPress XMLRPC