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Shield Security – Scanners, Security Hardening, Brute Force Protection & Firewall

By Shield Security
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  • Reviews
  • Installation
  • Support
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Description

Add expert security to all your WordPress sites with Shield Security, without being a security expert.

Get the highest rated 5* Security Plugin for WordPress

Per download, Shield Security has the highest 5* rating in the WordPress plugin repository.

Your Goal: Security Is Peace Of Mind and Freedom From Hackers

To be free from hackers, your WordPress Security need to be smarter, adaptive and uncomplicated.

Shield’s goal is to help you become free from repetitive and complicated security work, allowing you to re-focus and re-dedicate yourself to the work you love to do.

2 Key WordPress Security Strategies

Shield Security uses 2 simple key strategies to protect your WordPress sites:

  1. Prevention – Detect Bots, Intrusions, and Hacks
  2. Cure – Block Bad Bots and Repair Hacks

Key Security Strategy #1: Hacking Prevention

Bots cause nearly all our security troubles – they’re relentless, automatic and powerful.

Shield Security is the only plugin dedicated to their detection and erradication from your WordPress site.

Blocking malicious bots before they can do damage is the key strategy to protect and enhance security on a WordPress site.

Shield uses its features to detect these malicious visitors, then block access to your site altogether. This involves analysing different bot-signals and combining them to confidently identify a visitor as malicious.

These signals include:

  • site probes that generate 404 errors
  • failed logins
  • logins with invalid usernames
  • xml-rpc access
  • fake search engine web crawlers
  • invalid user agents
  • excessive website requests and resource abuse
  • and many more signals our security team have identified…

Early identification and blocking of malicious bots reduces your WordPress site’s vulnerability to attack.

Key Strategy #2: Hacking Cure

Sometimes, even with best security efforts, a site can get hacked. This usually involves file modification: either a hack file is added, or a file is changed.

There are 3 key WordPress assets whose files can be hacked:

  1. WordPress Core
  2. WordPress Plugins
  3. WordPress Themes

Almost every security plugin can now do #1 – it’s easy because WordPress.org provides file fingerprints for core files.

But, there are no hashes available for plugins and themes, so they can’t do it.

Shield, however, is the only WordPress security plugin that offers full and accurate detection of file modifications for plugins and themes because we build our own file fingerprints.

Shield can compare the file contents of every plugin & theme in the WordPress.org repository, looking for changed or new files

And, if you’re a ShieldPRO client, you can protect premium plugins/themes too, including Yoast SEO and Advanced Custom Fields Pro.

Where possible, Shield will repair any unrecognised or modified files it detects in those 3 key WordPress areas.

Shield makes Security for WordPress easy

There’s no reason for your WordPress security to be so complicated.

Shield Security is the easiest security plugin to setup – you simply activate it and off you go! As you learn more, you can tweak the settings to suit your needs.

Non-stop Security Notifications Are Not Okay.

Your security plugin must be smarter, and take responsibility for decisions so you don’t have to.

Shield Security handles many problems for you, making intelligent security decisions without noisy email notifications.

WordPress Security Features You’ll Absolutely Love

  • Exclusive AntiBot Detection Engine – The most powerful Bot Detection system on any WordPress plugin.
  • Automatic Bot & IP Blocking – points-based security system to block bad bots.
  • Add Security To Important Forms To Block Bots:
    • Login
    • Registration
    • Password Reset
    • [ShieldPRO] WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads
    • [ShieldPRO] Memberpress, LearnPress, BuddyPress, WP Members, ProfileBuilder
  • Brute Force Protection, Limit Login Attempts + Login Cooldown System
  • Powerful Firewall Security Rules
  • Restricted Security Admin Access
    • Prevents Unauthorized Changes To Site Even By Admins.
  • (MFA) Two-Factor / Multi-Factor Login Authentication:
    • Email
    • Google Authenticator
    • Yubikey
    • [ShieldPRO] U2F Keys
    • [ShieldPRO] Backup Login Codes
    • [ShieldPRO] Multiple Yubikey per User
    • [ShieldPRO] Remember Me (reduces 2FA requests for users)
  • Block XML-RPC (including Pingbacks and Trackbacks)
  • Block Anonymous Rest API
  • Block, Bypass and Analyse IP Addresses
    • Automatic IP Address Blocking Using Points-Based/Offenses System
    • Block or Bypass individual IPs
    • Block or Bypass IP Subnets
    • Full IP Analysis in 1 place to see their activity on your sites
  • Comprehensive WordPress File Scanner for Intrusions and Hacks
    • Detect File Changes – Scan & Repair WordPress Core Files
    • Detect Unknown/Suspicious PHP Files
    • Detect Abandoned Plugins.
    • [ShieldPRO] Malware Scanner – detects known and unknown malware.
    • [ShieldPRO] Plugin and Theme file scanning – identify file changes in your plugins/themes.
    • [ShieldPRO] Detect Plugins/Themes With Known Vulnerabilities.
  • Create a Custom Login URL by hiding wp-login.php
  • Detect (and optionally Block) Comment SPAM from Bots and Humans.
  • reCAPTCHA & hCAPTCHA support
  • Never Block Google: Automatic Detection and Bypass for GoogleBot, Bing and other Official Search Engines including:
    • Google
    • Bing,
    • DuckDuckGo
    • Yahoo!
    • Baidu
    • Apple
    • Yandex
  • Automatically Detect 3rd Party Services and Prevent Blocking Of:
    • ManageWP / iControlWP / MainWP
    • Pingdom, NodePing, Statuscake, UptimeRobot, GTMetrix
    • Stripe, PayPal IPN
    • CloudFlare, SEMRush
  • Full Audit Trail – Monitor All Site Activity, including:
    • All login/registration attempts
    • Plugin and Theme installation, activation, deactivation etc.
    • User creation and promotion
    • Page/Post create, update, delete
  • Advanced User Sessions Control
    • Restrict Multiple User Login
    • Restrict Users Session To IP
    • Block Use Of Pwned Passwords
    • Block User Enumeration (?author=x)
    • [ShieldPRO] User Suspend – manual and automatic.
  • Full/Automatic Support for All IP Address Sources including Proxy Support
  • Full Traffic Log and Request Monitoring
  • HTTP Security Headers & Content Security Policies (CSP)

Full Shield Security Features List

Dedicated Premium Security Support When You Go PRO

The Shield Security team prioritises email technical support over the WordPress.org forums.
Individual, dedicated technical support is only available to customers who have purchased Shield Pro.

Discover all the advantages of switching your WordPress security Pro at our Shield Security store.

Screenshots

  • A top-level dashboard that shows all the important things you need to know at-a-glance.
  • IP Whitelist and Blacklists lets you manage access and blocks on your site with ease.
  • A full audit log lets you see everything that happens on your site and why, and by whom.
  • Track user sessions and monitor who is logged-into your site and what they're doing.
  • Simple, clean options pages that let you configure Shield Security and all its options easily.

Installation

Note: When you enable the plugin, the firewall is not automatically turned on. This plugin contains various different sections of
protection for your site and you should choose which you need based on your own requirements.

Why do we do this? It’s simple: performance and optimization – there is no reason to automatically turn on features for people that don’t
need it as each site and set of requirements is different.

This plugin should install as any other WordPress.org repository plugin.

  1. Browse to Plugins -> Add Plugin
  2. Search: Shield
  3. Click Install
  4. Click to Activate.

A new menu item will appear on the left-hand side called ‘Shield’.

FAQ

Please see the dedicated help centre for details on features and some FAQs.

How does the Shield compare with other WordPress Security Plugins?

Easy – we’re just better! šŸ˜‰

Firstly, we don’t modify a single core WordPress or web hosting file. This is important and explains why randomly you upgrade your security plugin and your site dies.

Ideally you shouldn’t use this along side other Anti-SPAM plugins or security plugins. If there is a feature you need, please feel free to suggest it in the support forums.

My server has a firewall, why do I need this plugin?

This plugin is an application layer firewall, not a server/network firewall. It is designed to interpret web calls to your site to look for attempts to circumvent it and gain unauthorized access.

Your network firewall is designed to restrict access to your server based on certain types of network traffic. The Shield
is designed to restrict access to your site, based on certain type of web calls.

How does the IP Whitelist work?

Any IP address that is on the whitelist will not be subject to any of the firewall processing. This setting takes priority over all other settings.

Does the IP Whitelist support IP ranges?

Yes. To specify a range you use CIDR notation. E.g. ABC.DEF.GHJ.KMP/16

I want to review and manage IP addresses, where can I do that?

You can use IP Lists section. This is an essential tool you can use to analyse IP address, review information concerning blocked and bypassed IP addresses.

It shows you geo-location information and all the request made to your site by that IP, including offenses and any logged-in users.

I’ve locked myself out from my own site!

This happens when any the following 3 conditions are met:

  • you have added your IP address to the firewall blacklist,
  • you have enabled 2 factor authentication and email doesn’t work on your site (and you haven’t chosen the override option)

You can completely turn OFF (and ON) the Shield by creating a special file in the plugin folder.

Here’s how:

  1. Open up an FTP connection to your site, browse to the plugin folder /wp-content/plugins/wp-simple-firewall/
  2. Create a new file in here called: “forceOff”.
  3. Load any page on your WordPress site.
  4. After this, you’ll find your Shield has been switched off.

Remember: If you leave one of these files on the server, it will override your on/off settings, so you should delete it when you no longer need it.

Which takes precedence… bypass list or block list?

Bypass List: so if you have the same address in both lists, it’ll be bypassed and never be blocked.

Can I assist with development?

Yes! We actively develop our plugin on Github and the best thing you can do is submit pull request and bug reports which we’ll review.

How does the pages/parameters whitelist work?

It is a comma-separated list of pages and parameters. A NEW LINE should be taken for each new page name and its associated parameters.

The first entry on each line (before the first comma) is the page name. The rest of the items on the line are the parameters.

The following are some simple examples to illustrate:

edit.php, featured

On the edit.php page, the parameter with the name ‘featured’ will be ignored.

admin.php, url, param01, password

Any parameters that are passed to the page ending in ‘admin.php’ with the names ‘url’, ‘param01’ and ‘password’ will
be excluded from the firewall processing.

*, url, param, password

Putting a star first means that these exclusions apply to all pages. So for every page that is accessed, all the parameters
that are url, param and password will be ignored by the firewall.

How does the login cooldown work?

Login Cooldown prevents more than 1 login attempt to your site every “so-many” seconds. So if you enable a login cooldown of 60 seconds, only 1 login attempt will be processed every 60 seconds. If you login incorrectly, you wont be able to attempt another login for a further 60 seconds.

This system completely blocks any level of brute-force login attacks and a cooldown of just 1 second goes a long way.

More Info: https://shsec.io/2t

How does the GASP Login Guard work?

This is best described on the blog

How does the 2-factor authentication work?

2-Factor Authentication is best described here.

I’m not receiving the email with 2FA verification code.?

Email delivery is a huge problem with WordPress sites and is very common.

Your WordPress is not designed to send emails. The best solution is to use a service that is dedicated to the purpose of sending emails.

This is what we recommend.

I’m getting an update message although I have auto update enabled?

The Automatic (Background) WordPress updates happens on a WordPress schedule – it doesn’t happen immediately when an update is detected.
You can either manually upgrade, or WordPress will handle it in due course.

I’m getting large volumes of comment SPAM. How can I stop this?

You can block 100% of automated spam bots and also block and analyse human-generated spam. This is best described here.

Do you offer White Label?

Yes, we do. You can essentially rename the Shield plugin to whatever you would like it to be.

It ensures a more consistent brand offering and presents your business offering as a more holistic, integrated solution.

We go into further detail here.

I’d like to customise 2FA emails sent to my site users. How can I do that?

You can use our custom templates for this purpose.

How can I remove the WordPress admin footer message that displays my IP address?

You can add some custom code to your functions.php exactly as the following:

add_filter( 'icwp_wpsf_print_admin_ip_footer', '__return_false' );

How can I change the text/html in the Plugin Badge?

Use the following filter and return the HTML/Text you wish to display:

add_filter( 'icwp_shield_plugin_badge_text', 'your_function_to_return_text' );

How can I change the roles for login notification emails?

Use the following filter and return the role in the function:

add_filter( 'icwp-wpsf-login-notification-email-role', 'your_function_to_return_role' );

Possible options are: network_admin, administrator, editor, author, contributor, subscriber

What changes go into each Shield version?

The changelog outlines the main changes for each release. We group changes by minor release “Series”. Changes in smaller “point” releases are highlighted
using (.1) notation. So for example, version 10.1.1 will have changelog items appended with (.1)

You can view the entire Shield changelog here.

Reviews

It scans & monitors file changes with automatic removal! Literally the best

nregard April 12, 2021
I can not say enough about Shield Security's service and product. It's always a big ordeal to maintain the security of my wp site and I have not found a plugin/service that can keep my sites safe, detect file changes & remove them automatically until I found Shield Security. This plugin literally does it all, if any file is changed or added it notifies you & with the scanner running every hour I never miss a malware injection. It scans and monitors WordPress core files for changes, files for malware infections, and plugin & theme files for changes. THEN you can set it to AUTOMATICALLY delete these unrecognized files. What?!? How perfect is that! I just went in and removed all my other security plugins (malcare pro, wordfence, sucuri pro, Anti-Malware from GOTMLS.NET) because I am so sold on Shield Security Pro. It literally does everything and can I say that the pricing model is UNBEATABLE! I also need to mention that their customer support is also literally the BEST that I have ever encountered with any security/any product. I had a big issue I needed hands-on help with and they happily helped me with everything. They are so knowledgeable, down-to-earth, and kind. Such a great experience. This product has really been a lifesaver go try the week free trial or just buy the subscription, it's a no brainer!

A WP security plugin with a hassle free experience

ChromaDot April 5, 2021
I have been a user of Shield Pro for a month now and am incredibly happy with the experience. It's been completely hassle-free, which is something I can't say for every other security plugin I've tried so far. Shield is fast, non-intrusive and extensive. And the service from the Shield team has been phenomenal. I really can't recommend it enough. For example, I had a feature request and on getting in touch with Paul, he took the time to understand my request and implemented the feature in the next release. Fantastic service. Also, I would like to add, I used the free version of Shield for quite some time before upgrading to Pro. The team provided me with excellent service and answered all my questions in a timely manner while I was evaluating the free version. I've read several reviews that claim they don't provide support for free users - this is simply not true in my experience. In short - an excellent plugin, excellent support and excellent value. 100% recommended.

Can’t live without it now

Vivie March 31, 2021
I've tried MANY products, but nothing quieted down the SPAM on our site in forms and forums like Shield! We gave it the 14-day free trial, and deactivated Akismet which didn't really do the job. During the trial, we were still getting light SPAM come through, mainly in wpforo that we use for support. I reached out to the Team on Shield about it, and to my amazement, they worked on integrating WPForo with their the software. That's what I call customer service!

Hands down the best Security Plugin on the Market

alcatrazhorizon March 26, 2021
I tried tentatively with a single licence to test Shield Security out, without holding out much hope. I've not had much luck with security plugins. Even the really expensive ones don't seem to play nicely with my server set up. Well I tried one site, it worked perfectly. Bought the 3 licences and installed on another 2 sites, still not convinced. They also work perfectly, even with slightly different set ups. The modules allow you to tweak each site for its own needs, which is a game changer for me. I just wish I'd of got this plugin earlier. Oh well, better late than never. I've just bought 10 licenses to keep me busy for the next few days installing on more client sites. Thanks for this plugin. šŸ‘

Excellent product with exceptional customer service

shearease March 26, 2021
Shield pro has been protecting our website for a few years now. It is intuitive and easy to use. Customer service and support are also second to none.

Deep and reliable security, excellent support

kosis March 24, 2021
2-year user, had a learning curve to set up this plugin, but plenty of explanations at the plugin site to initiate a user into its features (and there are many). If you are new to security plugins, you can take it slowly and learn from these articles -- a useful mini-education that often saves me from having to guess. Otherwise once set up, Shield has worked flawlessly as far as I can see, so much so that, despite its depth, I rarely go in and look at settings (probably not good practice on my part, but still: what a relief) apart from reading the statistics in the admin screen and perusing the Monday email. It is almost as if Shield is hard-coded into my site and needs no attention, or very little. When another plugin changed and affected some of Shield's behavior, I didn't notice at first because I so rarely have to check Shield. Support at first could not resolve the issue but kept at it. Same with a different appeal earlier. They cannot anticipate every scenario but are willing to dig in and try to resolve things. A solid, well-supported security plugin that the author is constantly improving.`
Read all 959 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Shield Security – Scanners, Security Hardening, Brute Force Protection & Firewall” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors
  • Paul
  • Shield Security

“Shield Security – Scanners, Security Hardening, Brute Force Protection & Firewall” has been translated into 7 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Shield Security – Scanners, Security Hardening, Brute Force Protection & Firewall” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

The full Shield Changelog can be viewed from our home page:

Full Shield Security Changelog

ShieldPRO delivers exclusive security features to the serious site administrator to maximise site security
You’ll also have direct access to our technical support team.

Go Pro or grab the free ShieldPRO Trial.

Meta

  • Version: 11.1.1
  • Last updated: 5 days ago
  • Active installations: 70,000+
  • WordPress Version: 3.5.2 or higher
  • Tested up to: 5.7.1
  • PHP Version: 7.0 or higher
  • Languages:

    Dutch, English (Canada), English (UK), English (US), German, Italian, Japanese, and Romanian.

    Translate into your language

  • Tags:
    firewalllogin protectionmalwarescantwo factor authentication
  • Advanced View

Ratings

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  • 5 stars 903
  • 4 stars 23
  • 3 stars 10
  • 2 stars 7
  • 1 star 16
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Contributors

  • Paul
  • Shield Security

Support

Issues resolved in last two months:

13 out of 13

View support forum

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