Safe to mass ignore 404 with “^/wp-content/.*”?

  • Resolved askmssun

    (@askmssun)


    4 years ago

    I saw another post where you advised not to bother with pressing “ignore” on the random 404 hits. However, the number of the 404 errors I get is legitimately interfering with my ability to locate and fix actual 404 errors that require my attention. Most of these seem to be attempts at finding vulnerability and almost all of them are poking at my /wp-content/ folder. Based on what I can gather from your explanation for Regular Expression, seems like I could potentially “mass ignore” the /wp-content/ folder with something like ^/wp-content/.* However, I’m uncertain whether there would be ramifications to doing this (like somehow accidentally diverting legitimate traffic into the void). Any clarification or advice you can offer is much appreciated!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Plugin Author John Godley

    (@johnny5)

    You can use the ‘group by’ feature to help identify the important 404s.

    I would still not bother with random 404s, and your solution would run the risk of masking real 404s.

    There are other mitigation techniques which may be better, such as using Fail2ban.

    Thread Starter askmssun

    (@askmssun)

    Got it, thank you for the explanation. I do use “group by” and, looking at the 404 once a week, I get 15+ pages of error log AFTER grouping. I just tried searching for “wp-content” in the 404 log and “delete all” to filter out the legitimate 404s and that seems to work ok so I’ll keep doing that. I’ll also look into Fail2ban. Currently I set my Wordfence to block 404 traffic exceeding 10 per minute because I’m relatively confident that my site is well-configured; however, I still get tons of 404s logged in Redirection. Thank you again for your help!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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