What is the ShieldNET and how does it work?


Important: The ShieldNET option is no longer applicable to the latest version of the Shield Security plugin. It's enabled in the background by default.

What is the ShieldNET?

ShieldNET is the all-encompassing term that covers the technology and features that we use to gather security and threat information from across our entire WordPress ecosystem.

By collecting information from all active Shield Security plugins, we can offer this information back as threat intelligence to all sites running Shield.
The responsibility of identifying threats is then shifted away from individual sites to the collective.
A single site only knows what it knows. But when 10,000 sites get together and share information, they each know what 10,000 sites know.

This is massive. It completely transforms what’s possible when mitigating threats to our WordPress sites.

For more information about ShieldNET, read the release blog post or watch the video here. 

How does the ShieldNET work?

ShieldNET is enabled in the background by default.

Once the IP triggers the Shield offense or get blocked entirely, the IP Analysis section will show ShieldNET IP Reputation Score. You'll also see a small link which will direct you to the bot or not info page.

For example, the following visitor triggered the plugin offense - blocked entirely. ShieldNET reputation score is highlighted in yellow and the total score is 2:

This is probably a bad bot. If you click 'See Details' link, it'll direct you to the ShieldNET - IP Info / Bot or Not page:

You can also see that, based on bot signals, the Total Reputation Score is -115 and bad bot probability 100%:

Note: It may happen that you see that the IP is blocked entirely, but the ShieldNET reputation score is zero and that the info page shows insufficient data:

This just means the data isn't available - it really depends on if sites have reported the data to our API. Reverse DNS will fail sometimes too and there's nothing we can do with that.

Read more about the silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score here and high reputation score here. 

Note: ShieldPRO is required for the ShieldNET feature and is enabled by default on Pro sites. To find out what the extra ShieldPRO features are and how to purchase, please follow this link here.