News of data breaches and unauthorized access seems almost constant lately.
It is a reminder that security is not only a concern for large services. Small websites need to think about what happens at their own front door, too.
I used to install 6G Firewall quite often.
After I started relying more on Cloudflare, it gradually fell out of my routine.
I recently looked it up again and found that the project is still going. As of October 2026, its current generation is 8G Firewall.
The appeal back then was simple: no extra middleware or recurring service fee.
If I could edit an Apache .htaccess file, I could add another layer of filtering without much work.
I still had to watch for false positives, of course, but it was the sort of precaution I could put in place almost by default.
Nearly 20 years have passed since the project's early blacklist.
Now AI can help attackers search for vulnerabilities and vary their requests.
Does a collection of regular-expression rules still have a place?
A Small Firewall Built into Web Server Rules
nG Firewall, developed by Jeff Starr, is a collection of rules for filtering suspicious HTTP requests at the web-server level.
The "nG" stands for "nth Generation"; 8G is the eighth generation of the original project.
I have always thought the name was a bit of a missed opportunity.
It tells us about the generations, but not much about what the tool actually does. A more distinctive name followed by "Firewall NG" might have been easier to remember and search for.
Then again, those increasing generation numbers now tell a story of their own.
On Apache, the rules can live in .htaccess or the server configuration.
They examine elements such as the requested URL, query string, and User-Agent, rejecting requests that match suspicious patterns before the application handles them.
That may also avoid unnecessary work in PHP or a database.
This is not a WordPress-only plugin or a permanently running security service.
Think of it as a compact request filter implemented in the web server's configuration.
The original implementation is primarily for Apache. A community-maintained Nginx port is also referenced by the project, but Nginx cannot use an Apache .htaccess file directly.
From 1G to 8G: What Actually Changed?
Reading through the original posts, the most interesting change is not simply the number of rules.
Early on, the approach shifted from asking who is sending the request? to what does the request look like?
| Generation | Approximate period | Main development |
|---|---|---|
| Early blacklist / 1G equivalent | Around 2007 | Blocking lists of suspicious User-Agent strings |
| 2G | 2008 | Looking for shared patterns in attack URLs |
| 3G | 2008 | Combining URL, query-string, User-Agent, and IP checks |
| 4G | 2009 | Adding HTTP-method checks and modular rules |
| 5G | 2012–2013 | Refining request-pattern matching with false positives in mind |
| 6G | Around 2016 | Reworking rules for compatibility and precision |
| 7G | From 2019 | Further optimization and guidance for logging blocked requests |
| 8G | 2020s | Refining detection and compatibility; current generation in October 2026 |
The earliest blacklist was not originally published under the formal name "1G."
These dates are approximate starting points, not the latest update dates.
1G–2G: Moving Away from Huge Blocklists
The Ultimate htaccess Blacklist began by listing User-Agent strings associated with malicious crawlers and scrapers.
But User-Agents are easy to spoof, and IP addresses can change constantly. Maintaining an ever-growing list of identities was not a particularly satisfying solution.
With the 2G Blacklist, Starr focused instead on characteristics shared by attack URLs.
He described replacing more than 350 entries with roughly 37 lines.
I still like that idea: rather than memorizing every possible attacker, look for the patterns in what they send.
That became a defining direction for the project.
3G–4G: Combining Different Checks
The 3G Blacklist combined URL and query-string checks with User-Agent and IP filtering.
The 4G Blacklist extended the modular structure, including filters for HTTP methods.
Separating the rules made them easier to adapt, but stronger filtering brings another problem: legitimate requests can get caught as well.
The project's history includes adjustments intended to improve compatibility with WordPress and its plugins.
More rules do not automatically mean better security.
5G–6G: Taking False Positives Seriously
With 5G, the project put more emphasis on request patterns than on easy-to-spoof identifiers such as IP addresses and User-Agents.
The author presented this as a way to keep false positives down.
6G Firewall built on testing and community feedback to refine those decisions.
It remained easy to deploy, but blocking legitimate behavior was still a concern. Rejecting entire HTTP methods, for example, could interfere with sites that use REST APIs.
As web applications became more complex, simply blocking every suspicious-looking string was not enough.
7G–8G: Staying Small While Improving Operation
According to the 7G Firewall documentation, its rules were about 12 KB.
The project also provided instructions for recording blocked requests—useful when investigating false positives, although not a built-in dashboard.
8G Firewall is about 17 KB.
After an extended beta period, the author presented it as ready for production use.
It remains a free, open-source set of lightweight Apache rules.
As of October 2026, 8G is the current generation of the original Perishable Press project.
A separate WordPress product also uses the name "9G Firewall"; that does not make it the next official generation of this project.
Does It Still Work Against AI-Assisted Attacks?
Even when AI helps generate an attack, the server ultimately receives an HTTP request.
If that request matches a pattern covered by 8G, the rules may still reject it—regardless of how it was generated.
The harder part is that an attacker can vary the payload and retry after a failed request.
In a Cloudflare WAF experiment published in September 2026, AI models changed encoding and payload placement, used HTTP responses as feedback, and iterated.
The researchers narrowed 1,107 attempts to cases worth further human investigation. Passing a WAF was not treated as proof of a successful intrusion.
That makes the limits of a static rule set worth keeping in mind.
| Situation | What 8G may help with | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Known malicious URLs and queries | Rejecting matching patterns early | New or disguised patterns may slip through |
| Suspicious bot probing | Blocking some recognizable requests | Not a complete bot-management solution |
| Attacks contained only in POST bodies | May block another matching part of the request | Does not comprehensively inspect request bodies |
| Privilege abuse by authenticated users | May reject certain request shapes | Cannot enforce application authorization |
| Distributed, high-volume traffic | Rejecting some suspicious requests | Does not replace rate limiting or DDoS defenses |
These are limitations inferred from how 8G works, not measured detection rates for AI-generated attacks.
AI-assisted abuse also goes beyond crafting HTTP requests.
As Anthropic's September 2026 threat report discusses, activities such as reconnaissance and credential theft are outside what an .htaccess filter could stop.
Where Does Cloudflare Fit?
A front-end WAF such as Cloudflare can combine managed rules with bot protection and rate limiting.
nG Firewall instead runs at the origin and rejects requests matching locally defined patterns.
You can use both, but checking the same traffic twice does not necessarily improve protection.
Requests already blocked by Cloudflare never reach the origin.
For a website without a WAF, nG Firewall is one possible additional defense.
For a site already protected by a WAF, I would first compare the coverage and the cost of false positives and ongoing maintenance.
Neither option fixes authorization bugs inside a WordPress plugin.
And while the rules can reject requests before the application runs, evaluating them is not free.
Putting everything in .htaccess is not automatically the fastest approach.
Before deploying, I would take the current rules from the official 8G page, test them on a staging site, and check search, admin screens, REST APIs, forms, and external callbacks.
A backup of the existing configuration, 403 logging, and a rollback path are worth having.
The Value of a Project That Kept Evolving
The most interesting part of nG Firewall's history is not how many blocking rules it accumulated.
It is how the project kept rethinking what to filter—moving from long identity lists to patterns in requests, then repeatedly adjusting for compatibility and false positives.
AI may accelerate the search for new attack variations, and fixed rules alone cannot secure a website.
Software updates, input validation, authorization checks, WAFs, and rate limiting still need to work together.
But rejecting a known malicious request before it reaches the application is still a useful, limited job.
I originally liked 6G for its convenience. Looking back, I also appreciate how much attention the project has paid to making those rules practical.
I have not used it in a while.
Perhaps it is time to consider 8G again—while checking how much it overlaps with the WAF I already use, and what it might accidentally block.
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