Atlant Security

Changelog

1.1.38 – No False Cron Alarms, Honest Log Only Counts, Tidier Pages

• Fixed (important): Cron Guard flagged Atlant Security’s own scheduled tasks (a background malware scan, the alert summary, the daily digest) and WordPress core tasks created after its snapshot (every scheduled post, cleanup after a plugin upload, updater backups) as “unexpected scheduled tasks”, and where alerts were enabled 1.1.37 emailed an alert about each. Every task core schedules, and the plugin’s own, are now recognised; any other new task is still flagged, and so is a task that borrows one of those names but runs more often than every 5 minutes.
• Fixed: in Log Only mode the firewall still recorded each matching request as blocked with a 403, so the Visitor Log, the dashboard’s Blocked count and chart, the WAF page’s “Blocks (7 days)”, the daily digest and the incident report all counted attacks as blocked that had been let through. They now count only real blocks; Log Only matches are marked “WAF log only” in the Visitor Log and shown separately on the WAF page.
• Fixed: the Outbound Monitor never showed when a request was made, and its Quick Stats stayed at “–“.
• Fixed: the dashboard status strip cut most values off; each item now shows its label above its value.
• Fixed: WordPress’s own footer text was drawn over the plugin’s footer on every plugin page.
• Fixed: the settings search list was clipped to the width of the menu; it now opens at full width over the page.
• Fixed: “Who is logged in” cut off its “Log out everywhere” buttons and showed a truncated user agent; it now names the browser and system (“Safari on macOS”).
• Fixed: notices on many pages spread their bold words, links and code apart, the CAPTCHA “Where to get keys” box was jumbled, and the login URL field broke over three lines.
• Fixed: the Visitor Log and Audit Log filters stretched across the page and wrapped.
• Fixed: the visitor log recorded Android phones as Linux, and Microsoft Edge and Opera as Chrome.
• Fixed: alert emails for login lockouts had “(low; medium at the 24-hour tier)” in the subject; alerts now carry short subjects such as “Login lockout”.
• Fixed: creating a user also wrote a confusing “User role changed” entry to the audit log.
• Fixed: an ellipsis after every “At Risk” badge in the Hardening and Vulnerability Audit tables, a Permissions-Policy preview on the Security Headers page while that header is off, “1 requests throttled”, and “Idle timeout: 0s” (now “off”).
• New screenshots and a rewritten plugin page.

1.1.37 – Find Any Setting, Read Your Logs, Get the Alerts You Asked For

• New: a search box at the top of the plugin menu finds any setting on any of its pages as you type and takes you straight to it; press “/” to jump to it. Suggested on the support forum.
• Fixed: email, Slack and webhook alerts only ever fired for malware scans, although the Notifications page promised lockout and security-event alerts. New administrator accounts, two-factor lockouts, unexpected scheduled tasks, blocked outbound requests, failed two-factor emails, login lockouts, firewall auto-blocks and honeypot bans now raise alerts, filtered by your minimum severity. Each kind is sent at most once per 15 minutes (lockouts, blocks and bans once per 6 hours) with a count of what was held back, so a site under attack gets a summary rather than a flood. Alerts stay off until you enable a channel.
• New: “Send test” beside each notification channel, which waits for the answer and shows it (including the mail server’s own error), and a Recent alerts table listing what was sent where.
• Fixed: the Visitor Log showed at most 7 of the 30 days it keeps. It now reaches the whole retention period, with custom date ranges, country, method and HTTP-status filters, sortable columns, page size and a page-jump box. The CSV export follows every filter.
• New: the Audit Log can be searched, filtered by action, user and date, paged, and exported to CSV. It used to show the newest 200 entries and nothing else.
• Fixed: Terminate All Sessions, Force Password Reset and Rotate Keys log you out too, but the page carried on and every following action failed with “session expired”. It now says so and takes you to the login page, unless rotated keys still have to be pasted into wp-config.php: they stay on screen, and on the page for 30 minutes after you log back in. The incident report and the admin audit results now survive the logout.
• Fixed (important): the database part of the malware scan never checked wp_options or post content. A malformed search pattern made MySQL reject both queries, so they always came back empty. Run a scan after updating.
• Fixed: reloading the Malware Scanner mid-scan offered “Start Full Scan” again, and starting wiped the running scan’s findings. The page now resumes the running scan, a second start is refused, a Cancel button stops it, and false-positive marks have their own list with Undo.
• New: Session Security has its master switch on its own page and a “Who is logged in” list with “Log out everywhere” for each account. The idle-timeout help gave the wrong default.
• Fixed: “Lift Lockdown”, “Cancel Forced Reset”, “Whitelist My IP” and removing a whitelist entry stuck or stayed silent when a request failed.
• New: leaving a page with unsaved changes warns you, and a bar offers to save them.
• Accessibility: every toggle has an accessible name and a visible keyboard focus ring, dialogs close with Escape and return focus, icon-only buttons are labelled, and low-contrast grey text is darker. On phones the page list folds into one menu button and the log tables drop secondary columns.
• Fixed: long explanations in the Hardening checklist and the Vulnerability Audit were cut to a single line.

1.1.36 – Settings That Said “Secure” Without Doing Anything, Plus Lockout Recovery

Every item below applies on its own after updating; nothing needs re-saving.
* Fixed (security): “Block PHP in Uploads” never did anything. The option existed, and the Hardening page and the Vulnerability Audit reported “PHP execution in uploads blocked” because the checkbox was on, but no rule was ever written. It now writes the rule into wp-content/uploads/.htaccess (Apache and LiteSpeed), then verifies it by placing a test file in uploads and requesting it, and reports what actually happened. nginx and IIS get a snippet to paste. The rules are tried in two stages and rolled back if the server answers 500, so a host that forbids .htaccess overrides cannot be left with a broken uploads folder.
* Fixed: the “Directory Listing Disabled” check read its answer back to front. It is now verified by requesting an upload folder and looking for a listing; “Options -Indexes” is added where the server accepts it, and an index file can be added with one click.
* Fixed: saving the Settings page could switch the firewall from Tarpit to Block. The WAF Mode list on that page was missing Tarpit, so the browser pre-selected Block and the save wrote it.
* Fixed: “Export CSV” on the Visitor Log exported the first 50 rows and ignored the URL and logged-in filters. The file is now built on the server from the same filters as the table, every matching row, up to the retention period, with a row count shown before the download.
* Fixed: “Exclude Known Bots” was never read by the logger. It now skips search-engine crawlers (by user agent); blocked IPs stay blocked either way.
* Fixed: the About page claimed an “A+” grade and “All Active” on every site, listed JavaScript challenges and browser fingerprinting that do not exist, and counted 38 malware signatures. Every number and status on it now comes from the code and this site’s settings.
* New: Unlock. Login Security has an Unlock button per locked-out IP and a “Clear all lockouts” button; unblocking an IP also ends its login lockout. Before, the only way out of a 24-hour lockout was to whitelist the address, which exempts it from every protection for good.
* New: whitelisting asks for confirmation everywhere and explains what it bypasses.
* Fixed: the lockout recovery text named a plugin folder that does not exist. Every page that can lock you out now carries the same “If you get locked out” box: Safe Mode first, then the recovery link, then renaming the real folder.
* New: enabling the custom login URL from an IP that is not whitelisted now stops and offers to whitelist it first.
* New: a protection status strip at the top of the dashboard: firewall mode (with one-click “Switch to Block” when it is only logging), lockouts, two-factor, rate limits, logging, headers grade, last scan, uploads protection and GeoIP, each linking to its page. The dashboard also acknowledges a completed setup wizard.
* New: Rate Limits panel on the WAF page. The limiter has run since 1.0 with no switch and no visible numbers; the panel shows each limit, lets you change it, and counts the requests throttled in the last 24 hours.
* New: Content Security Policy directives, a report URI and each Permissions-Policy feature are configurable on the Security Headers page, with a preview of the exact header that will be sent. Before, the page said these were “available in the module code”.
* New: settings that can break a site (Force SSL for Admin, Disable XML-RPC, auto-updates, hidden author URLs) ask for confirmation and explain the consequence, on every page that offers them. The Hardening page gained Disable buttons and “How to fix” instructions for the checks it cannot fix itself.

1.1.35 – Two-Factor Login Could Be Completed With the Password Alone

1.1.34 was held back by the WordPress.org automated security review and never reached any site, so this release also carries the QR code fix listed under 1.1.34 below.
* Fixed (security, reported by the WordPress.org automated security review): a two-factor login could be completed with the password alone. WordPress creates the login session and its cookies before the plugin is told about the login; the plugin then cleared the cookies from the browser but left the session itself valid on the server. Anyone holding the password could keep the cookies from that first response and use them without ever entering a code. The session a password-only login creates is now revoked on the server before the code is asked for, so those cookies no longer work anywhere.
* Fixed (security): users who set up two-factor authentication voluntarily, when their role did not require it, were never asked for a code at all. Anyone with a second factor is now challenged on every login; the “require 2FA” setting only decides who must enrol.
* Fixed (security): XML-RPC accepted a bare password for accounts with two-factor authentication, because that route never asks for a code. Those accounts must now use an application password (Users > Profile) for XML-RPC and other API logins, which Jetpack and the mobile apps support. Accounts without 2FA are unaffected.
* Fixed (security): the correct password alone was enough to reset the brute-force counter for that IP address and to evict the account’s other sessions under the session limit, before the second factor was checked. The challenge now runs ahead of both.
* New: a limit of 10 incorrect codes per account in 15 minutes, counted across every login attempt. The old limit was per attempt, and anyone with the password could start a new attempt at will. Reaching the limit records a “2fa_locked” event, triggers your alerts, and tells the user to change their password, because whoever entered those codes had it.
* Codes are compared in constant time, and codes typed with spaces (as some apps display them) are accepted.

1.1.34 – Two-Factor QR Codes Now Scan

• Fixed (important): the QR code shown when setting up an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy and others) could not be scanned. QR codes above a certain size must carry a small “version information” pattern, and the built-in generator never drew it, so the code’s own data was written into that space and no scanner could read the result. A setup link is always long enough to need that size, so this affected every site. Typing the setup key in by hand still worked, which is how 2FA could be enabled at all.
• Fixed: one of the two copies of the QR code’s format information was drawn back to front. Most scanners fall back to the other copy, but it was still invalid.
• Fixed: on sites with a long title, setting up 2FA failed outright with “Request failed”, showing neither a QR code nor the key to type in. The setup link is now kept within what a QR code can hold, and if a code ever cannot be drawn the key is still shown for manual entry.
• Fixed: switching the method dropdown away from “Authenticator App” and back generated a new secret, so a code you had already scanned would never be accepted.
• Fixed: a site title containing “&” or an apostrophe appeared in the authenticator app as “&” or “‘”, and a colon in the title could confuse the app’s account name.
• Verified against an independent QR decoder for every code size the plugin produces, and against the published TOTP test vectors. If 2FA setup failed for you before, simply run it again.

1.1.33 – The Setup Wizard Runs on Activation Again

• Fixed: activating the plugin did nothing visible. The Setup Wizard now opens once, only for the administrator who clicked Activate, never during bulk or network activation or on a configured site. A dismissable prompt on the Plugins list and dashboard covers the cases the redirect skips.

1.1.32 – Author URL Repair: Rebuild, Rollback, and a Fix for Broken Slugs

Thanks to Francesco for the detailed report.
* Fixed (important): “Hide Usernames in Author URLs” could write an empty or meaningless slug for display names in non-Latin scripts. They are now transliterated first; where the server cannot (no PHP intl), the slug is left alone and the Hardening page says why.
* New: every slug change is verified after writing and rolled back if another plugin altered it; “Rebuild” and “Restore original author URLs” buttons; old author URLs redirect to the new ones; enabling the setting warns first.

1.1.31 – Author Enumeration: The Block Now Actually Runs

• Fixed (important): “Block Author Enumeration” did nothing on almost every site, because WordPress core’s canonical redirect ran first. It now runs ahead of core (renamed “Block Author ID Scans”), uses a temporary redirect, and stands down on plain permalinks where ?author=N is the archive itself.
• New: “Hide Usernames in Author URLs” rebuilds author archive URLs from display names. Off by default.

1.1.30 – Hardened Against Fatal Errors From Unexpected Hook Arguments

• Fixed: fatal errors when WordPress or another plugin passed an unexpected argument type to a hook the plugin listens to (multisite network_site_url() with a null scheme, site_url( null )). Every hook callback now validates its input.

1.1.29 – Full Audit Release

A top-to-bottom review of every module; migrations run on their own after updating.
* Fixed (security): stored XSS in the Post-Breach database scan results; the first visitor after an update had their IP removed from the block list.
* Fixed: ASWP_SAFE_MODE now pauses every blocking feature (it skipped the WAF, login lockouts, REST policies and honeypot bans).
* Fixed (2FA): “Disable 2FA” did nothing; admins can reset another user’s 2FA; email-code failures are surfaced; TOTP secrets encrypted at rest.
* Fixed: dead buttons (REST Add/Edit Policy, Outbound Save Allowlist, scan settings, whitelist remove, “+ Block IP”); CAPTCHA save no longer wipes the secret; re-running the wizard keeps custom settings.
* Fixed: false positives (WooCommerce checkout rate limit, code samples in posts, browser updates logging users out, CAPTCHA on non-wp-login forms, outbound monitor killing WP-Cron).
* New: scheduled background scans; quarantine warns before touching core, the active theme or plugins, with one-click Restore. Multisite activation, deactivation and uninstall cover every subsite. Performance work across logging and the dashboard.

1.1.28 – GeoIP “Download Database” Button No Longer Stuck Disabled

• Fixed: the “Download Database” button stayed greyed out even after entering a MaxMind license key, because it only came alive after clicking a separate “Save GeoIP Settings” button that the on-screen instructions never mentioned. It now activates the instant a key is typed or pasted, and clicking it saves the key and downloads the database in one step.

1.1.27 – Daily Digest Turns Itself Off on Upgrade

• Fixed: sites receiving the unwanted morning “daily digest” email now stop automatically on update – no wp-config edit, no visiting each subsite. The digest cron is only scheduled while the digest is enabled, so a disabled digest can never fire. Re-enable it in Notifications with one toggle if you want it.

1.1.26 – Notifications Are Now Opt-In

• Changed (default): all notification channels are OFF until you enable them, including the Daily Digest and email alerts, which previously defaulted to ON and mailed the site admin every morning. New installs only; sites that already had them enabled keep their setting.
• New (multisite): define( ‘ASWP_DISABLE_NOTIFICATIONS’, true ); in wp-config.php, or the aswp_disable_notifications network option, mutes email, Slack and webhook notifications network-wide. Safe Mode now also mutes notifications.

1.1.25 – REST API Policy Fixes + Friendlier Session Defaults

• Fixed: the REST API Policies editor was unreliable – new rules did not stick, deleting one reset the whole list back to the defaults, and saving could quietly blank out the built-in rules. The editor now works from the real rule data end to end; adding or deleting a rule saves immediately, and every field is preserved.
• Improved: you can type a plain route path (e.g. /sibs/v1/callback) instead of a regular expression, which makes it straightforward to allow a payment-gateway or other third-party webhook that the default rules were blocking.
• Changed (defaults, new installs only): session idle timeout now defaults to 0 (off) and “Exempt Administrators” to ON, so a fresh install no longer logs admins out of wp-admin on a timer.

1.1.24 – Session IP Binding Off By Default

• Changed (default, new installs only): “Bind to IP Address” under Session Security is now OFF. It invalidates the session whenever the visitor’s IP changes – which happens constantly on mobile networks, CGNAT, VPNs and rotating IPv6 addresses – so admins were being logged out every few minutes. User-Agent binding stays on and protects against most cookie theft. If you are already affected, turn it off in Session Security.

1.1.23 – Fixed: Brute Force Settings Would Not Save

• Fixed: on the Login Security page, changing “Max attempts before lockout” or the lockout durations and saving did nothing. The page has two save buttons that shared the same HTML id, so only the first one had a click handler. Save buttons are now wired by class, so every save button on every settings page works. Existing values are unaffected.

1.1.22 – Hide WP Version No Longer Breaks Asset Caching

• Fixed: “Hide WP Version” stripped the version query string from every enqueued script and style site-wide, including wp-admin. That breaks browser cache-busting, so a browser could serve a stale copy of a core file indefinitely, and admin screens built with @wordpress/data (such as My Jetpack) rendered blank. The version is now masked with a stable token instead of stripped: wp-admin assets are never touched, cache-busting keeps working, and the literal version stays hidden.

1.1.21 – Accurate WAF Description

• Fixed (accuracy): corrected the WAF description in the readme, the About page and the WAF settings page. Earlier copy described a “Pre-WordPress WAF” filtering requests before WordPress loads; no such mechanism ships in the plugin. The WAF inspects every request at init priority 0 – early in the request, but after WordPress core and plugin files have loaded. No functional change.

1.1.20 – Emergency Lockdown Now Works With Page Caches

• Fixed: Emergency Site Lockdown appeared to do nothing on sites running a page cache or CDN, because cached HTML is served without running PHP. Activating lockdown now flushes the object cache and every supported page-cache plugin (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed, SiteGround and more) and sets the standard no-cache constants; lifting it flushes again.
• Note: HTML behind an external CDN edge cache (for example a Cloudflare “Cache Everything” rule) must be purged there too.

1.1.19 – Two-Factor Enrollment & Recovery Fixes

• Fixed (lockout): turning on “require 2FA” for a role locked out every user in that role who had not yet set it up – they were sent to a code-entry screen they could never pass. Enrollment-pending users now keep a session confined to their profile page so they can complete setup; the REST API and XML-RPC stay blocked for them until they do.
• Fixed: a code entered immediately after finishing 2FA setup could be rejected as a replay for up to 30 seconds.
• Fixed: after the Post-Breach “Deactivate All Non-Essential Plugins” action, a dismissable notice now links to one-click restore.

1.1.18 – Login & Incident-Response Hardening

• Fixed (security): two-factor authentication could be bypassed during an active “Force Password Reset for All Users” window, because the force-reset redirect ran before 2FA enforcement and exited without destroying the session.
• Fixed: “Force Password Reset” could get permanently stuck with no off-switch – the flag only cleared when the very last flagged account reset its password, so one abandoned account pinned every admin to the profile page. Added an always-visible “Cancel Forced Reset” button, and the flag now clears on (re)activation.
• Fixed: brute-force lockout escalated permanently, because the per-IP failed-attempt counter was never reset on a successful login and never aged out – common on office or shared NAT addresses. It now resets on success and decays after 24 hours.
• Fixed: the firewall could block legitimate logins whose password happened to contain attack-like characters. Password fields are no longer pattern-inspected.

1.1.17 – Lockdown Off-Switch Fix

• Fixed: when Emergency Site Lockdown was active the “Lift Lockdown” button could disappear, leaving no way to turn lockdown off from inside the plugin. An always-visible “Lift Lockdown Now” button now sits in the lockdown status bar, and activating the plugin always lifts a stuck lockdown.

1.1.16 – Custom Login URL Fix

• Fixed (critical): with a Custom Login URL enabled, valid credentials bounced back to the login form and never reached the dashboard. The custom slug redirected the login POST to wp-login.php, and a 302 redirect turns a POST into a GET, silently discarding the username and password. The slug now serves wp-login.php in place, preserving the POST body, nonces and the login test cookie. All standard login hooks still fire, so 2FA and other login add-ons work on the custom URL.
• Fixed: /wp-admin was still reachable on subdirectory installs, because the guard only matched paths starting with “wp-admin”.
• Fixed: clearing the slug field appeared to do nothing. To remove the custom login URL entirely, turn the feature OFF, which clears the stored slug.

1.1.15 – Reinstall WordPress Core Fix

• Fixed: Post-Breach > “Reinstall WordPress Core” did nothing and always reported “already installed”, because Core_Upgrader was called with a version string instead of the update object it requires. It now forces a fresh update check against WordPress.org, installs a newer version if there is one, and otherwise performs a true re-install of the current version. wp-content/ is never touched.

1.1.14 – Login 429 Fix

• Fixed: legitimate users could get HTTP 429 “Too Many Requests” on /wp-login.php even without submitting wrong credentials. The login rate limiter counted every hit to the page (GETs, the lostpassword and resetpass flows, the logout link) toward a 10-per-5-min budget. It now counts only credential POST submissions, and skips already-authenticated users. Brute-force defense (the real one – 5 failed attempts locks out) is unchanged.

1.1.13 – Timezone Fix

• Fixed: admin times displayed several hours off on non-UTC sites – the display layer double-converted stored timestamps. New FortressWP\Time helper; the admin JavaScript now shows times in the site timezone, not the visitor’s browser.
• Fixed: GeoIP “last updated”, the brute-force lockout countdown, and the 08:00 daily digest schedule now all use the correct timezone.

1.1.12 – Quarantine Review Ritual

• New: quarantine now opens a review modal – file details, a forensic download button, VirusTotal / Hybrid-Analysis links, and three required acknowledgment checkboxes (also enforced server-side).
• Improved: CSV export includes confidence and matched-signature columns.

1.1.11 – Conservative Quarantine

• New: per-signature fidelity ratings and per-finding confidence; quarantine is gated to HIGH confidence and single ambiguous hits are review-only.
• New: regex matches inside string literals or comments are treated as data, not malware – eliminates self-match false positives.

1.1.10 – Critical: Self-Quarantine Lockout Fix

• Fixed (critical): the scanner could quarantine its own files and take the whole site offline; it now hard-excludes known security plugin directories.
• Fixed (critical): the plugin bootstrap survives a missing module file instead of fataling the site.

1.1.8 – Default-Allow Policy for Vendor Bots

• Fixed: AI crawler defaults flipped to “allow” – legitimate vendor bots (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Bing) are never blocked unless the operator opts in.
• Fixed: the Honeypot reverse-DNS check now fails open, so a transient DNS error can’t ban a real Googlebot.

1.1.7 – Critical Audit Hardening

Fixes for 14 critical and 12 high-severity issues found during a full external audit. Recommended upgrade for everyone.
* Fixed (critical): fatal-at-login bug in concurrent-session enforcement; IPv4-mapped-IPv6 IP-block bypass; outbound SSRF DNS-rebinding race; CIDR trusted-proxy parsing; over-broad Cloudflare auto-whitelist; web-accessible quarantine directory and wp-config key backups; a WAF-rule ReDoS; plaintext Custom Login URL recovery token; unvalidated plugin-restore input.
* Fixed (high): 2FA enrollment-session bypass and cross-user nonce reuse; 2FA disable without re-authentication; racy IP blocking; Googlebot user-agent-spoof honeypot exemption; notification webhook SSRF; scan symlink escape; WAF encoded-escape and capability bypasses; and more.

1.1.6 – Scanner Accuracy

• Fixed: false-positive flood on fresh installs (core checksum verification, safe-path allowlist, tightened signatures). New: “Mark as False Positive” with Undo.

1.1.0 to 1.1.5

• New: CAPTCHA (reCAPTCHA v2/v3, Cloudflare Turnstile); CSV export of scan findings; HMAC-signed custom-login grace cookie; enforced 2FA for required roles; always-on SSRF blocking; trusted proxy IPs; About page; denser admin layout.

1.0.0 to 1.0.9

• Initial release and its follow-ups: WAF, brute-force protection, malware scanner, post-breach recovery, IP blocking, visitor and audit logs, hardening, rate limiter, real-time dashboard, setup wizard, inner sidebar navigation, GeoIP, custom login URL, password policy, honeypot, security headers, two-factor authentication, notifications, AI crawlers, REST API policies, session security, outbound monitor and cron guard. Prefix migration to aswp_ with automatic database migration.