Description

DON’T JUST SCAN FOR MALWARE. PREVENT IT INFECTING YOUR SITE.

Protect yourself from 0-day threats with security processes, not just signatures.

Infected with malware?
BitFire malware scanner has one of the highest malware detection rates in the industry.
Most malware scans take less than 60 seconds. See the data:
**WordPress Malware Detection Rates vs WordFence

Complete Bot protection
Automated scanning tools make up 99.99% of all WordPress hacks.
BitFire is the only WordPress security plugin that tracks every bot on your website.
We compare each bot visit against a list of 600 known good bots and only allow them if their IP address is valid.
This prevents hackers from impersonating good bots like GoogleBot and bypassing your security.
See every bot accessing your site and approve or deny it.

Integrated human verification
BitFire integrates a free human verification system that validates your visitors are real humans.
Using integrated JavaScript, humans can only access your website after answering a JavaScript challenge.
This works similar to cloudflair human verification but is much faster, usually < 100 milliseconds.

Human verification is important to block hackers since many automated hacking tools impersonate
web browsers. BitFire stops all of these from accessing your website.

Runtime Application Self Protection
BitFire is the only RASP firewall for WordPress.
*How RASP works from checkpoint
Integrated directly with WordPress and your webserver, bitfire stops malware before it can infect your site.

RASP File Protection
File-Protection runs anytime a PHP file is attempted to be modified on your server.
BitFire intercepts the write and verifies that a valid site administrator is modifying the file and not a hacker.
This prevents any malware from infecting your site even if the firewall missed it.

RASP Database Protection
Database-Protection monitors SQL queriers to your WordPress database.
Anytime data is attempted to be modified BitFire inspects the tables being updated.
If the query is attempting to create a new user or update permissions to administrator level,
BitFire will block the query unless the user is logged in as an administrator.

This defeats any attempt by hackers to install backdoor accounts onto your server.

RASP Network Protection
Last, BitFire RASP intercepts all network requests from your webserver to the Internet.
BitFire blocks all Server Side Request Forgery attempts, stops all Time Of Use, Time of Check attacks (TOUTOC) and prevents your server from talking to a malware command and control servers.

Comparison with WordFence

WordFence is the most popular choice for WordPress security. How does BitFire compare to the market leader? WordFence VS BitFire

Privacy / Monitoring / Data Collection

Privacy. We take privacy very seriously. BitFire inspects all traffic going to the webserver and takes care to filter out any potentially sensitive information by replacing it with redacted. The config.ini file includes a list of common sensitive field names under the “filtered_logging” section. You can add additional fields to filter in the config file by adding a line “filtered_logging[field_name] = true” and replacing “field_name” with the name of the desired parameter to filter.
BitFire includes an error handler which monitors it’s operation. In the event an error is detected only in the BitFire software; including during install, an alert can be sent to BitFire’s developer team. The development team monitors these errors in real time and includes fixes for any detected errors in each new release.
Updates. Four times a day BitFire will request the latest signatures from the BitFire signature API. These signatures are sent over SSL(TLS) and encrypted specifically for each client site. In addition bitFire also sends a list of installed plugins and version numbers to compare against recently posted security vulnerabilities.

Screenshots

BitFire shows detailed graphs about the type of attacks your website is defending.
Bot Control page allows instant authentication of over 600 known bots.
Detailed malware scanner contains over 20 million data-points and scans 10,000 PHP files per minute.
View detailed block and alerting information about each request, add blocking exceptions with a single click.
Database malware scanner with backup and restore points can identify malware comments and posts from over 2.5 million domains.
Plugin monitoring alerts you within the hour when new plugin vulnerabilities effecting your site are released so you can stay on top of important security updates.
Simple on/off configuration with granular rules can be set to alert to test new rules before actually blocking.

Installation

Install this plugin via WordPress plugin installer.
In your Plugin Dashboard, click “Activate Plugin.”
Open the BitFire Settings from your WordPress admin dashboard. Complete the setup wizard.
Run a malware scan from the BitFire malware menu and verify your site files are 100% clean.
Run a database malware scan to ensure your content does not have any links to over 2.5 million malware sites.
Monitor your firewall blocking on the BitFire Dashboard page

FAQ

If other security plugins live up to their hype, why do they scan my site for malware daily?

That’s an excellent question. The majority of popular security plugins create custom signatures for each WordPress plugin vulnerability as they are publicly disclosed. With over 10,000 known WordPress security vulnerabilities and less than 200 signatures, they miss blocking a lot of hacks. They are also unable to block the most common security flaws (access control errors) for anything they do not have a pre-built signature for. To make the situation more difficult, they delay these rules by up to a month for non-paying customers.

Can BitFire block bots and automated attacks?

BitFire’s primary feature is bot blocking which is 100% functional in the free version. 99% of WordPress attacks are from automated tools scanning every domain and IP address for known vulnerabilities. BitFire verifies human web browsers with a JavaScript challenge similar to Cloudflare but over 50 times faster (1/10 second VS 6 seconds). BitFire also includes a list of over 80 search engines and SEO tools that are network verified to ensure only valid bot traffic reaches your site.

Do I have to buy it?

BitFire includes a complete standard firewall, malware scanning, vulnerability detection offsite database backup and unbreakable bot blocking for free. Our patented RASP technology and SMS based 2FA is only available to our paying PRO and PREMIUM clients. https://bitfire.co/pricing

How does Redirection Protection work?

Our unique software keeps track of every 3rd party domain your web page uses (Facebook, Google, JavaScript APIS, themes, etc.). After several weeks of learning, CSP security headers are sent to visitors instructing their browsers to only use or redirect to your approved domain list.

Does BitFire prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)?

BitFire includes outstanding XSS protection, including HTTP headers and content filtering for persistent, reflected, and DOM-based XSS attacks.

Does BitFire block SQL Injection attacks (SQLi)?

Yes. BitFire has advanced SQL parsing similar to MySQL syntax parsing and can understand SQL queries regardless of encoding, injected comments, and other evasion techniques.

Why shouldn’t I use WordFence?

If you use WordFence, you should only use the paid version. WordFence has a team monitoring emerging WordPress vulnerabilities and writing custom rules to block specific exploits. They are very good at it and run a great blog on their work. Paying customers receive these virtual patches as soon as they are available. Free customers receive the patches 30 days later. If your website is vulnerable, it is almost guaranteed to be hacked before the patch is available to free customers. Don’t leave your site at risk.

Why is BitFire better than WordFence?

“Better” can be subjective. Our generic attack detection is on-par, if not better. WordFence does not have browser or bot network authentication and can not block many automated attacks. BitFire is the only WordPress plugin offing operating system integrated file-locking and browser enforced redirect protection.
We are also definitely FASTER. WordFence typically doubles page load time, adding 100-200ms to every request on typical dedicated T4 small/medium AWS servers, more for shared environments. BitFire runs under 5ms on similar AWS hardware and near 10ms on shared environments.

We believe BitFire is the only plugin that can effectively protect WordPress sites – and is the only one with a 100% money-back guarantee for paid customers (up to 12 months effective).

Reviews

shoutmoney སྤྱི་ཟླ་གཉིས་པ། 1, 2023

I don't know much about security but the creator of this plugin Cory does. He personally gave me tips and he configured my settings and actually taught me about hacks and bots and stuff and he showed me how Bitfire protects me from hacks.

Max སྤྱི་ཟླ་དང་པ། 24, 2023

I woke up yesterday to a hacked website which kept redirecting me to a spam site. I couldn't log in or anything. I found a youtube video about BitFire and contacted them. They got right back to me, installed the software directly on my server, found the malware, cleaned it and then spent almost an hour on the phone talking me through my web site security and even gave me some pointers about my page load time. crazy! super nice guy. Highly recommend contacting them and using their malware scanner.

Read all 2 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“BitFire Security – RASP Firewall & Malware Cleaner” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Translate “BitFire Security – RASP Firewall & Malware Cleaner” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

3.9.12

reduced batch size of malware check based on available memory
fixed malware false-negative for some uses of ‘passthru’
Added support for auto decoding base64 encoded data
improved support for XMLRPC checks
fixed some false positves for unknown core files (backup files, etc)
added new icon for “unknown” file type different from “malware” type
fixed warning on PHP versions > 8.1
improved directory traversal for some directory symlinks
fixed bug on standalone installs not resolving css files correctly
reduced complexity of malware scan dashboard page

3.9.10

fixed issue mixed type issue for older PHP versions (<= 7.4)
begin internationalization work
remove dependency on debug

3.9.9

Improved malware detection and removed most false positives
Improved performance of quick scan mode
Reduced filesystem impact of both standard and quick scans
Improved Bot auto learning and dynamic domain resolution

3.9.6

DIVI builder theme support (support self included iframes)
deactivation effect
bug fix for some older versions of curl

3.9.5

Improved logging for download errors
Fixed missing blog-header.php hash codes
Added Support for command line malware scan
Improved support for WPEngine
Improved order of operations to increase performance
Support for XML and text data in Post Data
Bypass some DNS lookups to dashboard page
Improved include file malware scanning
Fix stand-alone password install problem
Added command line malware scanner

3.9.4

fixed compatibility problem with WPEngine
improved bot blocking compatibility

3.9.3

improved bot detection and handling
remove old bot exceptions from exception list
fixed a bug on tagging and allowing unknown bots on the bot control screen
removed inline svg images from malware frequency scanning

3.9.2

revamped malware scanning. reduces false positives for PRO and 3rd party plugins
new advanced malware scanning mode with configurable scan settings
async http requests on malware scanning

3.7.1

reduce malware false positives
added detection for image include malware
improved machine learning dataset
added __wakeup() handlers for all classes with magic methods to prevent inclusion in POP chain
improved bot listing formatting to support longer data formats
better handling of some server temporary failures (filesystem, network, etc)

3.6.4

improved malware detection
improved support for some smaller hosting providers
improved bot authentication during learning

3.6.3

various PHP warning fixes

3.6.2

Improve support for WordPress installs in path sub directory
Performance improvement for user capability check
Small warning fixes for PHP 8.1

3.6.1

New bot control management page
Improved settings and RASP configuration
Improved upgrade process to keep all config data between upgrades, re-installs
New hidden (secret) file support for nginx without modifying file permissions
(configuration data is now stored in a random hashed directory)
Small bug fixes on malware scanning for files in root directory
Improved support for PHP 7.2

3.5.3

Added over 600 known bots with network identification
Improved malware scanning support for unknown files
Added additional scan locations
Added JavaScript malware scanning

3.0.8

Database Malware Scanner Support
Offsite database backups
Fixes for some apache server installs
Support for malware scanning plugins off the WordPress repository
Added support and small fixes for PHP 8.1
Improved malicious file upload scanning
Improved basic settings and advanced settings page

3.0.6

Added a pretty error page for browsers that do not support JavaScript when JavaScript verification is enabled.

3.0.4

Minor bug fixes for corner cases

3.0.1

Added database malware scanning support for over 2.5 million domains

2.3.5

improved configuration wizard and css styles

2.3.4

Malware Scanner Support
Fixed a bug in browser verification on mobile safari.

2.3.3

Added CSS styles to the blocking page

2.1.2

Added plugin vulnerability notifications. These will check over 3500 active CVE advisories
for any known security issues in your plugins or themes
Improved upgrade process which could forget some settings on upgrade
Fixed a possible rare false positive on base64 encoded data
Improved learning mode to find more false positives
Fixed a warning on PHP 8.x with undefined variable for alerts from IPs with no associated country
(localhost)
Fixed a bug which incorrectly reported the currently viewed alert page number range on the dashboard screen

2.1.0

Several bug fixes
Improvements to malware scanning, added additional files to scan list
Fixed bug adding additional allowed domains on settings page

2.0.1

Implemented setup wizards and online help functions.
Added auto-learning exceptions for new installs to prevent possibility of false-positives..
Workflow and usability improvements

1.9.7

fixed an issue that could cause false positive when non administrators
were editing posts. This check has been expanded to authors as well.
fixed an issue that was causing extra padding in config.ini files
added support for auto-discovering bots to whitelist
reduced the maximum size of saved blocked data

1.9.6

fix for WordPress source code path resolution
use CMS default script inclusion system for admin pages

1.9.5

added initial support templates for custom CMS
refactored escaping on MFA page

1.9.4

fixed an issue which could allow admin requests to be rate limited
refactored malware scanner to support custom CMS

1.9.3

added support for redirect url on MFA login page
fixed issue with MFA login submission
added support for Content Security Policy WordPress integration
WordPress MFA login support complete
PHP file write blocks are now logged in the dashboard

1.9.2

improved support for alternate content management systems
removed direct $_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST access and replace with filter_input
fixed issue that could cause malware download to fail with expired access token

1.9.1

improved install logging
additional tests for installation procedure

1.9.0

added SQL auditing feature. Currently this is an advanced toggle only available
by editing the config.ini. Planned features: SQL Injection Detection, CC data
access, replay log for DB restores
namespaced all defines to prevent any possible name collisions
added WordPress plugin and theme enumeration blocking
refactored several echo lines to remove dead code and xss encode on the same line
added fix for a bug in php >=8.0 <= 8.1 where splat operator on variables containing :
would be incorrectly interpreted by PHP 8.0 as a named operator.
added support for cloudflare real connecting IP
plugins not registered at wordpress.org are now rolled into a single malware line

1.8.9

upgraded bootstrap and chart.js to latest stable releases
refactored all API methods to be pure and testable
refactored malware detection to allow detecting malware on non-WordPress installs
updated all WordPress path resolutions
added code to ensure config.ini is not web readable even when .htaccess is disabled
INI settings: reset realpath.cache_size to system size when used with openbase_dir
special handling of DOCUMENT_ROOT for WordPress
improvements to installing always on protection on Nginx systems
make config.ini unreadable even on systems that do not support .htaccess

1.8.6

added additional WordPress abstractions as requested by WordPress team
upgraded bootstrap css files
abstracted wordpress plugin with pure implementations and additional unit tests

1.8.5

refactored several functions with pure implementations and added unit tests
refactored views to use new template system
refactored wordpress integration to use standard plugin architecture
moved all dashboard javascript, image, css files into the distribution
removed dead code
removed a warning for php 8.1

1.8.3

Added support to enable always-on from settings page
Added support for WordPress Engine
Fixed bug where rotating encryption keys would prevent new signatures from downloading for up to a day

1.8.0

Improved support for PHP 8.0
improved settings page
improved malware scanner
additional whitelist SEO bots
improved auto-detection of server support

1.7.3

First public release of BitFire WordPress security plugin