Frequently Asked Question
Shorter Answer:
Yes, you are protected by a firewall not just a plugin which will break your site (*glares at WordFence*) or slow it down (all the rest).
Longer Answer:
Our plugin is part of our overall security implementation. It listens for all messages marked as spam & also failed login attempts, and tells the system to redirect connections from the bad IP address to a purgatory page (look at http://abuse.techsurgeons.com) where it give a non-hacker human inadvertently blocked a chance to regain access, or to blackhole a bot/hacker from being able to connect to the server again.
Our general policy is to only enable the services needed, and even then limit access to protect against hacker attacks. The fewer openings we have to our services, the better.
In other words, database and FTP access are disabled by default. And when we provision FTP access, it is two steps - requiring both a user account, and access to a site be specifically granted.
In addition, each site is isolated from their sibling sites on the server. One hacked site can not spread their damage to other sites on the same server. (This is how about a quarter of site hacks occur - especially at BlueHost, HostGator, and GoDaddy.)
Add to that our regular monitoring of overall traffic to look for patterns of bad behavio(u)r, malware checks and validation of all files to ensure none have been modified, and that's most of what we have in place.
Plus, and this is the most important thing, we assume that all sites will eventually get hacked.
This is why we're so paranoid about backups. We take at least three backups a day using two different methods, and have a remote server (with completely different credentials) pulling a copy of one of those known good backups to said remote server once a day. We keep between 14 and 30 days worth of backups.