Remove & Disable XML-RPC Pingback Plugin

Prevent your WordPress site from participating and being a victim of pingback denial of service attacks. After activation the plugin automatically disables XML-RPC. There’s no need to configure anything.

By disabling the XML-RPC pingback you’ll:
* lower your server CPU usage
* prevent malicious scripts from using your site to run pingback denial of service attacks
* prevent malicious scripts to run denial of service attacks on your site via pingback

From sucuri.net:

Any WordPress site with Pingback enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites.

Learn More

• How To Prevent WordPress From Participating In Pingback Denial of Service Attacks – wptavern.com
• More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack – sucuri.net
• xmlrpc.php and Pingbacks and Denial of Service Attacks, Oh My! – hackguard.com

Is Your Site Attacking Others?

Use Sucuri’s WordPress DDOS Scanner to check if your site is DDOS’ing other websites

Why Not Just Disable XMLRPC Altogether?

Yes, you can choose to do that, but if you use popular plugins like JetPack (that use XMLRPC) then those plugins will stop working. That is why this small plugin exists.

Using The WordPress Dashboard

1. Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
2. Search for ‘Remove XMLRPC Pingback Ping’
3. Click ‘Install Now’
4. Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

1. Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard
2. Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area
3. Select remove-xmlrpc-pingback-ping.zip from your computer
4. Click ‘Install Now’
5. Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

1. Download remove-xmlrpc-pingback-ping.zip
2. Extract the remove-xmlrpc-pingback-ping directory to your computer
3. Upload the remove-xmlrpc-pingback-ping directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

1. 

   Postman: Without the plugin installed

2. 

   Postman: With the plugin installed

1.6

• 2023/07/24
• Added filter to check for and remove ‘X-Pingback’ header if necessary.
• Added settings page
• Tested up to WP 6.2

1.5

• Code hardening.
• Verified compatibility with WP 5.9.3

1.4

• New: Added a count under “Settings -> General” to see number of blocked attempts.
• Tested up to WP 5.8
• Added newsletter admin notice.
• Code hardening.

1.3

• 2020/09/21
• Cleaned up code
• Added counter for number of times the pingback method was blocked.
• Tested with WP 5.5.1
• 28,595 downloads

1.1

• 2019/04/09
• version bump

1.0.0

• First release