In February we launched Wordfence Central, an efficient way to manage the security of many WordPress sites in one place. If you have multiple sites and haven’t checked it out yet, you should. It includes a powerful dashboard, a single interface to view and manage security findings across all of your sites and robust new tools that make managing Wordfence configuration for your websites a breeze.
Wordfence Central has been incredibly popular. Tens of thousands of sites have been added so far and more are added every day.
Today we are announcing the first major feature release for Central since its launch in February. This represents a big step forward not only for Central, but for Wordfence as a whole. The first major improvement is the addition of a brand new Central alerts feature. You can now configure Central to take over security alerting for your sites, and leverage severity level configuration and a new daily digest feature. Alerts can be sent via any combination of Email, SMS and Slack. We’ve also added a new Security Events tab to Central along with the ability to alert you when the higher priority events occur.
Improving the Signal to Noise Ratio
Alerts sent from Wordfence in the default configuration do a great job of letting you know when you have issues and reminding you important updates are needed. But if you manage a lot of sites, the volume of alerts sent can be overwhelming. We hear from customers about this frequently. The new Central alerts feature gives you everything you need to solve that problem by alerting you to things that need immediate attention and letting you deal with the lower priority information when your schedule allows.
New Severity Classification
Alerts are now categorized by severity: Critical, High, Medium and Low. You are able to choose how you want to be notified about events based on what severity level they have been assigned. You can even choose to turn off alert notifications altogether.
SMS Alerts and Slack Integration
When an important security event occurs you want to know about it right away. Emails can get lost in your inbox, even when they’re important. With that in mind we added SMS as a delivery option. For most, text messages do a great job of getting your attention when it really matters.
We’ve spoken to many organizations who, like us, use Slack for team collaboration. Wordfence Central can now send highly detailed information to Slack for your team to act upon.
Here’s an example of a Security Event alert delivered via Slack:
Daily Digest
We’ve also added an optional daily digest, which provides a high level summary of the activity for all of the sites connected to your Central account for the previous day. This is a great way to stay on top of lower priority events and findings without receiving individual alerts for all of them.
Here’s an example of a Daily Digest message delivered via Slack:
We expect a common approach will be to enable the daily digest and disable alerts for low and potentially medium severity findings and events.
Security Events
We’ve enabled a number of new security events that are now viewable via a new “Events” tab in Central. They are:
- When Wordfence is automatically updated, you’ll get a notification when an update occurs. *
- If Wordfence is deactivated. *
- When the Wordfence firewall is deactivated.
- When an IP address is blocked
- When someone is locked out from login
- When someone with administrator access signs in. *
- When that administrator signs in from a new device or location. *
- When a non-admin signs in.
- When a non-admin signs in from a new device or location.
- When someone is blocked from logging in for using a password found in a breach. *
- When there’s a large increase in attacks on my site. *
- When a Wordfence scan stops without completing.
You can also configure alerts to be sent via email, SMS or Slack for events followed by a * in the list above.
Here is what the new events tab looks like:
Getting Started
All of these new features are currently available on Wordfence Central. In Central you will see a new gear icon in the upper right corner that will take you where you can configure Central alerts. Once you’ve enabled alerts from Central make sure to disable them for your individual sites. Simply select “No” for the “Send alerts from individual sites?” option.
You will need to upgrade to Wordfence 7.3.4 (or greater) for security alerts to begin flowing into the new events tab. There are no configuration changes necessary for events to start flowing to Central once you’ve upgraded to 7.3.4.
We’re very excited about these new features and would love to hear any feedback you have in the comments. As always our team is available to help out with support questions on the WordPress.org forums for free users and here on our website for Premium customers.
