Prevent user name and email leakage

Stops user name enumeration and other type of user name and email leakages.

Specifically does the following:

1. When the site is configured to use pretty permalinks, the plugin will prevent

author=1, to

com/author/admin which will leak the existence of a user

named admin which can be used in further brute force attacks.

(This is also know as “user enumeration”).

-

With the REST API restrict user name related information (actual user name

and user posts page URL) to only admin users.

-

Preventing authentication failure notices on the login page to disclose

the existence of user names/user emails resulting from displaying different

messages hen the user is incorrect and when the password is incorrect. Just

display the same failure message for whatever is the failure reason.

-

Preventing the reset password mechanism from disclosing user names/user emails

resulting from displaying different messages when a user/email for which a reset

is requested exist in the DB, and when it does not. Just display the same message

for both.

Even with the plugin active, if your theme displays author information while linking

to author pages this can be used for user name leakage. In this case you should

think about totally decoupling user and author information with plugins like

org/plugins/authors-as-taxonomy/

Another thing that the plugin do not do is to handle leakage resulting from the use

of gravatar, as this requires a replacement of gravatar functionality itself and

it is much harder to exploit than the other leakages.

And last leakage hole not covered right now, but might be covered in the future,

is leakage of information via the sign in process. We leave it for later as most

installs do not allow people to sign in.

org/wordpress-plugins/prevent-user-name-and-email-leakage/

Documentation

Contribute

com/calmPress/Authors-as-taxonomy