Ever since security was invented on the internet it has been a two sided battle. On one side the security experts trying to offer protection whilst on the other side hackers try to get in.

Two decades ago everything evolved slowly. Hackers had to manually try new techniques, which security firms monitored by ‘honey pots’ (sites which they ran with the intention that hackers would think were standard sites and try to access. As new vulnerabilities were discovered by the hackers, the security firms would watch, identify the patterns of the attack and then close the doors.

The security experts would put together the files of patterns of typical attacks, share them and the users would install them. In the days of low powered servers and personal computers and a lot of manual work this was satisfactory, but over the last few years AI has, unfortunately, given hackers a lot more power. They are using tools to quickly learn how to change the fingerprint of their attacks so that the patterns don’t detect them. They also have a huge advantage in that they can themselves install the protection and test it so see where they can break in.

That’s where we need to move on now. Instead of watching for typical attacks and blocking them, we need to watch for typical ‘safe’ behaviour, learn that and block the rest. This involves a lot of learning power, but we have that to hand on modern servers. Each site and its admins will have its own fingerprint. It could be that admins nearly always login office hours, from a desktop machine using Safari in the UK. So if suddenly someone in the USA logs in at 03:00 and still provides the correct credentials, that the protection should instantly block, or at least stall, that login.

That’s the theory behind Janric Shield. Especially on small sites your typical login behaviour is predictable. Yes, you might suddenly need to access your WordPress site whilst on holiday, but are you still using the same device, the same password manager and so on? Janric Shield learns how YOU login to your WordPress admin and once it is confident that it has learnt your typical behaviour it can start to block malicious actors and keep you safe.

Best of all, we’re making it available for free.