Defeat wp-login.php Brute Force Attack Using Cloudflare & .htaccess

In dealing WordPress Login (wp-login.php) brute force attack, previously, I recommend changing username & password as mentioned in WordPress Brute Force Attack – Change Username/Login ID post.

It does help to prevent the hacker to gain access, but the attack caused another problem as it consumed a large amount of server resources. Plugins such as Brute Force Login Protection may assist you to block the IPs after a number of wrong attempts. However, some of the hackers have large numbers of IPs, from hundreds to thousands of IPs. I encounter this problem & really taxing my server resources similar to DDOS attack.

While looking for better alternative to solve this problem, I found out that if you are using Cloudflare, the request headers contain the country code of the visitor’s origin. The header I’m talking about is the “HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY”.

What you to do is to allow only visitors from certain country to access “wp-login.php” file by using “HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY” header  and “.htaccess” file.

The example below is only allow visitors from United States & Canada. Change the country code in the third line to make it applicable to your locations.

 <FilesMatch "wp-login.php">
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP:CF-IPCOUNTRY} !^(US|CA)$
  RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]
 </FilesMatch>


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