The easy way to keep WordPress Safe from Malicious Logins

One of the more recent additions to the Jetpack suite of plugins is an important service called Protect.

Here’s what Jetpack Protect does:

Jetpack Protect is a cloud-powered brute force attack prevention tool. We leverage the millions of WordPress sites to identify and block malicious IPs. Jetpack Protect tracks failed login attempts across all installed users of the plugin. If any single IP has too many failed attempts in a short period of time, they are blocked from logging in to any site with this plugin installed. 

Other Plugins also block malicious logins. What is so powerful about Jetpack Protect is that the more it is used by the WordPress community the better it becomes.

If someone attempts to login to your site and Jetpack Protect blocks them – that same IP address will be blocked from logging into all other sites that are using Jetpack Protect. Their hacking attempts will be shut down.

Jetpack Protect in Action

At the bottom of your Jetpack stats summary, next to the number of spam comments blocked by Akismet, you’ll now see the number of blocked malicious login attempts.

Whitelist your own IP Address

When you activate Protect in Jetpack be sure to click configure. Copy your own IP address and add it in the box. Whitelisting an IP address prevents it from ever being blocked by Jetpack. If you have other users or if you regularly login from other locations you’ll want to whitelist those IP addresses here to.

How do I remove the “Prove your humanity” math problem to login to WordPress?

Jetpack protect adds a “prove your humanity” math problem to the WordPress login screen. Once your IP has been whitelisted, this extra level of protection will be removed.

We recommend that you activate Jetpack Protect — your WordPress website will be much safer.