I've built a couple community sites that I never put into production. I'm still looking for good solutions for the next iteration of this endeavour. ...

Over the last few days I was securing one of my sites, and for the first time I implemented Fail2Ban. That software monitors log files, and when defined regex conditions are met it triggers actions, specifically to ban IP addresses through IPTables. ...At least that's how I understand it so far, and it seems to work like that. :) What I've unknowingly described for this ticket is the essence of Fail2Ban, which has filters for a lot of software products. Now I'm thinking that filters can be created for the logs of other WP plugins, and the action taken when a rule is matched would be to update the Defender log, rather than banning an IP. I don't know if anyone is using Fail2Ban like that but I suspect someone is. For all I know that could be a core/advertised feature - to do things other than actual banning via IPTables. If nothing else, one thought I had was that it would be helpful to have a Fail2Ban filter for the Defender logs, so that when it detects an intrusion we can then ban the offending IP at the server level. This will help with other WP sites on the same server and other applications. I could even take the IPTable rule and copy it to my other systems : If some bad actor tries to hack one of my systems/sites, I don't want them to have access to ANY of my systems in my cloud network. I could do this one myself very easily with no changes required in Defender or WP. This isn't a big deal guys. Think big, and sometimes small solutions can help to get you there. HTH

Sorry for the month-long delay on this. With many issues there is only time to recognize and report the issue. It's a luxury to have the time to go back, remember the setup, reproduce, re-confirm in the ticket, etc. It will take a while for me to get back to this one. But I thank you for your initial diagnostic effort and I will eventually come back to this.

That's interesting - the site where I found this is in development and I didn't think I had any kind of caching on, but of course there are gremlins trying to speed up or slow down our sites all over the place. Thanks for your time to confirm this!

I do agree with that. Thank you very much!

This should have been a bug report under Feedback, sorry.

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