How To: Enumerate WordPress Users(and how to fix it)

  • by Amando Abreu
  • on 18 February 2019

A common attack vector for WordPress is to enumerate users and see what juicy data you can get, and potentially try to bruteforce the password, or even use known passwords from leaks on other services.

This is easily done because if you browse to /?author=1, WordPress will kindly redirect you to /author/name/ and literally hand over the information you want

for i in {1..5}; do curl -s -L -i http://www.wordpress-site.com/?author=$i | grep -E -o "" title="View all posts by [a-z0-9A-Z-.]|Location:." | sed 's/// /g' | cut -f 6 -d ' ' | grep -v "^$"; done

The fix

Place this code in your functions.php file.

if (!is_admin()) {
    // default URL format
    if (preg_match('/author=([0-9]*)/i', $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])) die();
    add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'shapeSpace_check_enum', 10, 2);
}
function shapeSpace_check_enum($redirect, $request) {
   // permalink URL format
   if (preg_match('/\?author=([0-9]*)(\/*)/i', $request)) die();
      else return $redirect;
}

About the author

Amando Abreu got into electronics as a kid, started programming microchips in his early teens, moved onto web development in his late teens, and got into people; psychology; and business in his twenties. Currently co-founder & CTO @ Perlo.io
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