Brute force attacks on my websites

In the last few months since I setup my own server I've been experiencing something I didn't even know might have happened before now.

I'm talking about brute force attacks on each of the websites I host. None of them are at all clever and I've been mitigating these problems recently anyway. 

But before I had root access to my server I had no idea that these attacks happened so often. The last few days I have been blocking several IP addresses from SSH and website visits on the sites I host, but I'm starting to notice a trend.

In fact, this trend relates to a post I made when I first moved to WordPress. I haven't used WordPress for years and I'm happy to say that, because I wasn't a huge fan of WordPress. I ended my WordPress part of my website at the end of 2013 and I haven't looked back. However, my websites are still getting constant requests to access one certain file that doesn't exist. I'm talking about these errors in my Apache error logs:

• /var/log/apache2/access.log.1:IP_ADDRESS - - [07/Nov/2017:12:38:28 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 404 28038 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.1"
• /var/log/apache2/error.log.1:[Tue Nov 07 05:37:02.133215 2017] [:error] [pid 30560] [client IP_ADDRESS] script 'wp-login.php' not found or unable to stat

There are hundreds of them! As a result, I've decided since none of my customers or myself use or will use WordPress, I'm going to block all wp-login requests.

If there's one thing you should take from this post, check your logs for the same issue!