A Nigerian developer has released a free WordPress plugin that blocks malicious bot traffic on news websites.
BotFend Anti-Bot Firewall is now available on the official WordPress.org plugin repository. The plugin helps publishers reduce invalid traffic that can trigger AdSense ad serving limits and increase server costs.
BotFend includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that filters traffic at the server level before WordPress fully loads, and syncs bad actors to Cloudflare. It also provides bot detection, behavioral analysis, brute-force protection, XML-RPC blocking, and geo-location filtering. BotFend also includes File Guard, which monitors WordPress upload directories, detects unauthorized file permission changes, and automatically fixes them.
The firewall includes four protection modes — Learning , Standard, Aggressive and Emergency Mode — and uses adaptive intelligence to automatically select the appropriate mode based on whether the visitor is a normal user, a suspected bad actor, or an active threat.
External services such as AbuseIPDB, Google reCAPTCHA, and IPHub require free API keys and are disabled by default but can be enabled manually. Tor System blocking is also available and can be enabled manually without an API key.
The plugin was previously known as Safebot Defender. It requires WordPress 6.4 or higher and PHP 8.0 or higher.
“We built BotFend out of necessity,” said Omajemite Don. “Having managed high-traffic news platforms myself, I saw how easily a bot attack could crash a server or get an ad account flagged.”
Publishers can install BotFend directly from their WordPress dashboard or download it from WordPress.org.
Download Link https://wordpress.org/plugins/botfend-anti-bot-firewall/