Sudden increase in lockouts – reasons why?

Usually just the random ebb and flow of the bot swarm. Or you have a site that a criminal decided is worth targeting and they pointed their exploit bot directly at your login to try a brute force.

I use plugin “WPS Hide Login” to reduce this annoyance and risk. It plays well with Wordfence, though Wordfence itself should have a login obfuscation feature, IMHO.

(Or better, why in creation WordPress itself doesn’t have a feature to make a secret login URL during installation, that is a mystery of the universe. Doing so would eliminate so much bot traffic we could probably solve global warming by shutting down hundreds of data centers due to reduced bandwidth.)

MTN

Hey thanks MTN
I checked out that plugin and at the moment there are known issues with certain themes. However there is a great thread on the support forum for it that discusses supplementary tactics.
I can’t think of any reason for being deliberately targetted but am going to play with various suggestions to see if I can get the problem to disappear for now.
Thanks again

Hi thefreebird,

I agree with mountainguy2 in that hiding/moving the login page might help you out. There are other plugins that do the same thing as WPS Hide Login that you could try out.

Sometimes you can become a target if you have a vulnerable/outdated plugin or theme, or one that was vulnerable recently. However, like mountainguy2 said, it could just be the random cycle of automated attacks. They typically give up once they have run their course and not found a weakness.

Marking the post as resolved. However, feel free to post your findings.