iThemes Security’s IP Banning Features Now Support IPv6

The latest version of iThemes Security Pro (2.2) and iThemes Security free (5.3) just added support for IPv6 to the Banned Users, Whitelist & Lockout features. The goal of this update was to bring our IPv6 support up to match our existing IPv4 support, which includes:

• Whitelisting IPs including IP ranges to prevent accidental lockouts.
• Banning IPs and IP ranges including checks to make sure you aren’t banning a whitelisted IP or your current IP, and full support for Apache, NGINX, and LiteSpeed rewrites (banning before they hit WordPress).
• Lockouts for misbehaving IPs for too many log in attempts, 404 abuse and reCAPTCHA failures.

In the process, we not only brought our IPv6 support up to match our IPv4 support, but also improved our overall support:

• Better detection of overlapping IP ranges – Fixed an issue where you could ban a range that completely contained a whitelisted range.
• Edge IP detection – IPv6 doesn’t reserve a network and broadcast IP, so we needed this, but also some places are assigning broadcast IPs since they’re not really used anymore and there’s an IP shortage.
• More fine-grain control for banning ranges – Previously, you were only able to ban based on the octet, so you could ban (or whitelist) ‘192.168.*.*’ or ‘192.168.1.*’ but not ‘192.168.0-128.*’. Now you can use CIDR notation (123.123.123.123/YY or 1111:1111:1111::1111/ZZZ) and we support any valid number for the YY and ZZZ.

Banning IPs and Whitelisting IPs in iThemes Security

To take advantage of the new IPv6 support, there are 2 different settings in iThemes Security that allow you to whitelist and ban IPs and IP ranges.

1. From the iThemes Security Settings tab, click Banned Users. In this section, click the box next to Enable Ban Users to activate this feature. In the Ban Hosts section, you can ban users by individual IP address or IP address range using wildcards or CIDR notation.
2. Again from the iThemes Security Settings tab, click Global Settings. Scroll until you see the Lockout White List section. Make sure to click the Add my current IP to Whitelist button. In this section, you can also white list other users by individual IP address or IP address range using wildcards or CIDR notation.

Update to iThemes Security 5.3 and iThemes Security Pro 2.2

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