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    <title>Transition Technology: Ticket #851: Bot attacks on Transition Culture</title>
    <link>http://localhost:8080/trac/ticket/851</link>
    <description>&lt;p&gt;
Yesterday there was a load spike on &lt;a class="wiki" href="http://localhost:8080/trac/wiki/ParrotServer"&gt;ParrotServer&lt;/a&gt; caused by a bot doing thousands of POSTs to &lt;tt&gt;xmlrpc.php&lt;/tt&gt;.
&lt;/p&gt;
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    <image>
      <title>Transition Technology</title>
      <url>/trac/chrome/site/TransitionNetwork-Logo-Web-Small.jpg</url>
      <link>http://localhost:8080/trac/ticket/851</link>
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    <item>
      
        <dc:creator>chris</dc:creator>

      <pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2015 11:26:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <title>hours, totalhours changed</title>
      <link>http://localhost:8080/trac/ticket/851#comment:1</link>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">http://localhost:8080/trac/ticket/851#comment:1</guid>
      <description>
          &lt;ul&gt;
            &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hours&lt;/strong&gt;
                changed from &lt;em&gt;0.0&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;0.25&lt;/em&gt;
            &lt;/li&gt;
            &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;totalhours&lt;/strong&gt;
                changed from &lt;em&gt;0.0&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;0.25&lt;/em&gt;
            &lt;/li&gt;
          &lt;/ul&gt;
        &lt;p&gt;
I have added this to the main &lt;tt&gt;.htaccess&lt;/tt&gt; file for &lt;a class="ext-link" href="http://transitionculture.org/"&gt;&lt;span class="icon"&gt;​&lt;/span&gt;http://transitionculture.org/&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;pre class="wiki"&gt;# This was being abused
&amp;lt;Files xmlrpc.php&amp;gt;
   Order deny,allow
   deny from all
&amp;lt;/Files&amp;gt;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;p&gt;
I also used IP tables to block the IP address doing this yesterday -- it did 45,856 POSTs, pretending to be Google, in one day:
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;pre class="wiki"&gt;185.62.188.91 - - [09/May/2015:14:08:26 +0100] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0" 200 370 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1;  http://www.google.com/bot.html)" 548 595
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;p&gt;
We should also consider installing &lt;a class="ext-link" href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fail2ban/"&gt;&lt;span class="icon"&gt;​&lt;/span&gt;WP fail2ban&lt;/a&gt; -- the site sees a lot of attempts to brute force it, for example there are between 500 and 1.5k attempts a day on Transition Culture, 62.5k in the last month:
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;pre class="wiki"&gt;grep wp-login.php access.log-20150510 | wc -l
573
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150509.gz | wc -l
454
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150508.gz | wc -l
567
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150507.gz | wc -l
1581
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150506.gz | wc -l
953
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150505.gz | wc -l
1525
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150504.gz | wc -l
1250
zgrep wp-login.php access.log-20150503.gz | wc -l
496
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;p&gt;
For the server as a whole, 1/3 million brute force attempts in the last month:
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;pre class="wiki"&gt;zgrep wp-login.php */logs/access*.gz | wc -l
335599
&lt;/pre&gt;
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