My WordPress instance is hosted at my own domain and is installed in subdirectory xxxx (i.e. not in the root directory). 5 days ago I added a WP blog, and also started commenting in social media about the blog posts.In 36 hours from noon 20 Dec to midnight 21/22 Dec (both UTC) I was visited from 85 separate IPs each issuing 5 identical requests, 2 of which always failed because the requested file was in subdirectory xxxx and not in the root directory as expected by the visitor. Although the IPs were distributed around the world, most were in the Buffalo area of the US.Should I be worried about these visits? If not, should I try to be helpful and redirect the failing requests to the correct subdirectory?The 5 requests issued by each visitor were:GET / (successful)GET /wp-login.php?redirect_to=/ (failed 404 because wp-login is in directory xxxx)GET /wp-login.php?action=register (failed 404, as above)GET / (successful)POST /xxxx/xmlrpc.php (successful, but no $_POST data provided)A sample set of Apache log records is listed below. All 85 visits had identical referer, UserAgent, Accept and Accept-Language EXCEPT that the UA for the POST contained different PHP version numbers, presumably matching each visitor's installed PHP version.NB: Because of the stackexchange limit for new members of 2 links per post, I have changed the referer value within 3 of the records below to referer as 1st log record.192.3.124.131 - - [21/Dec/2015:13:04:10 +0000] GET / HTTP/1.1 200 44884 http://www.example.com/ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36192.3.124.131 - - [21/Dec/2015:13:04:12 +0000] GET /wp-login.php?redirect_to=/ HTTP/1.1 404 336 referer as 1st log record Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36192.3.124.131 - - [21/Dec/2015:13:04:15 +0000] GET /wp-login.php?action=register HTTP/1.1 404 336 http://www.example.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=/ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36192.3.124.131 - - [21/Dec/2015:13:04:19 +0000] GET / HTTP/1.1 200 44886 referer as 1st log record PHP/5.{3|2}.{1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|0}{1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|0}192.3.124.131 - - [21/Dec/2015:13:04:20 +0000] POST /xxxx/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1 200 370 referer as 1st log record PHP/5.3.90
WordPress: Many IPs issuing wp-login redirect + wp-login register + xmlrpc. Problem or not?
wordpress;web crawlers