Brute Force Attack Protection (formerly Protect)

The length of time is based on a number of factors and is not a set amount of time.

If Jetpack has flagged your IP address for any reason it may block you from logging in. In this case, you’ll see something like this:

Enter your email address and hit Send. You will receive an email with a special link you can click to regain access to the login form. If you get an error when clicking the link in the email, you can allowlist your IP address as covered under Settings to unblock yourself. If you are still blocked, it’s likely due to a configuration issue on your server. You can disable Brute force protection to regain access to your site. Then contact us for help further troubleshooting.

The math captcha is used as a fallback for the brute force protection feature. If your IP has been blocked due to too many failed login attempts, you may still access your site by correctly filling out the math captcha along with the correct login credentials. In very rare cases, you might see the captcha if you’ve not obtained an API key or during times of very heavy attacks.

Whenever someone tries to log in to your site, Jetpack’s Brute force protection feature looks at that person’s IP address and compares it with our global database of malicious IP addresses.

For this to work properly, we rely on IP addresses stored and provided by your server. Unfortunately in some cases your server may not return any IP address, thus blocking Protect from working properly. When this happens, the brute force protection feature will be disabled and we will let you know.

If that happens, do not hesitate to send a link to this page to your hosting provider, so they can take a look and fix the issue for you. They can also contact us directly via this contact form if they need more information.

If you tried to log in to your site multiple times but failed to log in because you had forgotten your password, you may end up being blocked by Jetpack’s brute force protection feature.

In a WordPress Multisite installation, you can log in to any account that exists on the network through any log in page on the network.  As a result, if you have Jetpack’s brute force protection active on some sites but not all, then no site is truly being protected.

To address this, please network enable Jetpack on your multisite installation and activate the brute force protection feature on the network’s primary site.  Once completed, Jetpack’s brute force protection feature will be activated on every site on your network, even if Jetpack isn’t connected on those sites.

The best way to explain this feature is that there are thousands of “bots” out there trying to gain access to sites all over the internet. No matter what size your site is, there’s always someone or something trying to “break in”. WordPress is very secure and usually the weakest point is someone’s password. Bots consequently try to guess people’s passwords to get in.

Jetpack’s brute force protection feature collects information from failed attempts from millions of sites and protects you from these attacks. For example, if a bot tried to gain access to site A, and then went to site B, Jetpack’s brute force protection would already know who this bot is and before it even tries to get into site B, it would be blocked.

Along with that, it’s also really important to have strong secure passwords.

e.g.

• Which user names need more securing?
• Is this via wp-login, or via XMLRPC?
• From which IP addresses do these arrive?
• When did these occur? Is there a pattern?
• If these were found, how many more are there that were not detected?

We don’t have access to this information. Jetpack’s brute force protection was built to be lean and simple. It’s built in such a way that you don’t have to think about these questions or make any decisions. As such, the only data we store is the total number of attacks blocked.