What is Smart 404 Blocking?

The Smart 404 Block is an extension for the All In One WP Security and Firewall plugin and gives you the ability to automatically and permanently block IP addresses based on how many 404 errors they produce.

Firstly, what is a HTTP 404 event?

The Wikipedia definition is:

The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested.

If you were to look at all of the HTTP 404 events which occur on your website during the space of a typical day, week, month or year you may be shocked by what you find. Firstly you will be surprised by just how many 404 errors occur on your site in the space of a few hours especially if you have a busy site.

But you will be even more alarmed when you see the non-existent URLs people are trying to reach on your site. Along with the legitimate 404 errors which occur when someone innocently mistypes the URL of one of your pages, you may see a sobering amount of 404 events which are malicious in their origin and are basically attempts by hackers to find weaknesses in your site.

Some “malicious” examples we see daily on typical sites are things like:

• attempts by unauthorized visitors to reach your login page
• URLs with the following: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=revslider_show_image&img=../wp-config.php
• URLs with the following: /wp-admin/js/mssqli.php
• …..and there are literally thousands more examples of 404s which are indeed suspicious!

These types of suspicious 404 events are increasing exponentially as the online world becomes more popular and hackers are creating more and more bots which are are looking for weaknesses in your site and which are producing these 404 errors.

What does this add-on do?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to monitor HTTP 404 events and block IP addresses based on how many 404s they produce?

Well this is exactly what the Smart-404 add-on allows you to do and more!

More often than not, visitors with sinister intentions will produce a lot of 404s on your site and  finally with this plugin you now have the opportunity to block them permanently.

This plugin will monitor the HTTP 404 events on your site and will automatically and permanently block IP addresses based on the amount of 404s within a certain period of time.

The plugin will also identify the country of origin of the IP address for each 404 produced.