Wordpress xmlrpc page returns non xml data for non browser applications

Question

I am using python (http://python-wordpress-xmlrpc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to connect to wordpress to post contents.

I have a few wordpress sites to which I connect using sitename.com/xmlrpc.php

However one of my sites recently started reporting a problem while connection mentioning not a valid xml. When I view the page in browser I see the usual "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only." but when I connect using python I see the following message:

funct ion toNumbers(d){var e=[];d.replace(/(..)/g,function(d){e.push(parseInt(d,16))}) ;return e}function toHex(){for(var d=[],d=1==arguments.length&&arguments[0].cons tructor==Array?arguments[0]:arguments,e="",f=0;fd[f]?"0":"" )+d[f].toString(16);return e.toLowerCase()}var a=toNumbers("f655ba9d09a112d4968c 63579db590b4"),b=toNumbers("98344c2eee86c3994890592585b49f80"),c=toNumbers("c299 e542498206cd9cff8fd57dfc56df");document.cookie="__test="+toHex(slowAES.decrypt(c ,2,a,b))+"; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-37 23:55:55 GMT; path=/"; location.href="http://targetDomainNameHere.com/xmlrpc.php?i=1";This site requires Javascript to work, please enable Javascript in your browser or use a browser with Javascript support

I searched for the file aes.js, no luck. How to get this working ? How do I remove this? I am using the latest version of Wordpress as of 07.NOV.2017

Answer 1

You can try to pass "User-Agent" header in the request. Generally the Java or Python library would use their version in the User-Agent allowing the word-press server to block.

Over-riding User-Agent header with browser-like value can help get data for some word-press servers. Value can look like: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36