Title: User Found By: Author Posts – Author Pattern
Last modified: November 16, 2021

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# User Found By: Author Posts – Author Pattern

 *  Resolved [Joris Le Blansch](https://wordpress.org/support/users/apiosys/)
 * (@apiosys)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/)
 * Dear support,
 * This plugin usually does the trick (I disable some other stuff as well separately
   like author sitemaps). But on one site, I can still enumerate one of 4 users 
   using WPScan like so :
 *     ```
       [i] User(s) Identified:
   
       [+] firstname-lastname
        | Found By: Author Posts - Author Pattern (Passive Detection)
       ```
   
 * This isn’t the real name of course but it did detect a user with it’s real firstname,
   hyphen, lastname. This doesn’t correspond to a login nor nickname but does to
   the real person’s name. Is the plugin supposed to catch this or not?
 * Kind regards,
 * Joris.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Alan Fuller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alanfuller/)
 * (@alanfuller)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074598)
 * The plugin only tries to catch login ids, that is the primary purpose.
 * Themes can have many ways of ‘leaking’ real names and that is what the passive
   detection of WP Scan does. And I don;t attempt to protect against all themes 
   cioding.
 * The initial primary purpose was to detect that a site was being scanned by WP
   Scan ( without permission ) and then to use fail2ban to block that IP at the 
   firewall. On the basis that anyone scanning for something without permission 
   is up to no good.
 * Despite the ethical intention of WP Scan team, their tools are used by many less
   ethical type.
 *  Thread Starter [Joris Le Blansch](https://wordpress.org/support/users/apiosys/)
 * (@apiosys)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074610)
 * OK fair enough, thanks for your clear and quick reply. I’ll get rid of that type
   of scan by other means.
 * Thanks.
 * Joris.
 *  Plugin Author [Alan Fuller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alanfuller/)
 * (@alanfuller)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074693)
 * Thanks, I would be interested in seeing if there are improvements though.
 * Obviously you would not wish to share the specific link and observation here 
   but if you want to contact me via my homepage with details I will certainly take
   a look and see what may be possible.
 *  Thread Starter [Joris Le Blansch](https://wordpress.org/support/users/apiosys/)
 * (@apiosys)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074852)
 * Thanks for the proposal, I have “solved” it with just an .htaccess 403 on the
   author pages which weren’t needed anyway. No time to debug the theme of the client
   neither so let’s call it “fixed”.
 *  Plugin Author [Alan Fuller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alanfuller/)
 * (@alanfuller)
 * [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074863)
 * That might be a useful option to add – just a ‘turn off author pages’ I like 
   the concept as that would be the big leak of names – I’ll add it to the roadmap.
 * Thank you for your input.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘User Found By: Author Posts – Author Pattern’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/stop-user-enumeration/assets/icon-256x256.png?rev=1677689)
 * [Stop User Enumeration](https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-user-enumeration/)
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 * 5 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Alan Fuller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alanfuller/)
 * Last activity: [4 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-found-by-author-posts-author-pattern/#post-15074863)
 * Status: resolved