WordPress often comes under attack by hackers, due to its popularity.

In early 2013 a mass brute force attack struck WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence.

These attacks were caused by botnets (computers infected with malware and programmed to attack other vulnerable sites).

How To Protect Your WordPress Site From A Brute-Force Attack

Brute-Force Attacks

A brute-force attack is a technique used to break an encryption or authentication system by trying all possibilities.

(Source: Chinese University Of Hong Kong)

One of the many ways hackers use to try and break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. To achieve this, hackers use software programs that can work through hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using weak login details, your website can be an easy target for hacking attempts.

This is called a “brute-force” login attack.

Botnets – What Are They?

A botnet is a number of Internet-connected computers communicating with other similar machines in an effort to complete repetitive tasks and objectives. This can be as mundane as keeping control of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, or it could be used to send spam email or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks. The word botnet is a combination of the words robot and network.

(Source: Wikipedia/botnet)

A “Botnet” is a network of private computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious code, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, typically without the computer owners even being aware that this is going on.

Botnets are normally used used to blast out mass spam emails.

Below is a screenshot taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009 called “Zeus” …

(The Zeus botnet has been actively infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009. Image source: SecureList.com)

These ongoing botnet attacks on WordPress were highly distributed and well organized. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of hosting companies in the initial attack alone, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users admin areas took place. The mass brute force attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites and blogs being hacked each day.

News of the large-scale brute force botnet attack was reported by all the major webhosting companies, as well as the leading technology media publications, such as TechNews Daily, Forbes, PC Magazine, Tech Crunch, BBC News, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(WordPress is often the target of mass malicious attacks by hackers)

Does This Mean WordPress Is Not Secure And We Should Stop Using It?

No. In fact, there are lots of great reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your online presence.

To understand why WordPress is a secure platform for websites, read this article: Is WordPress Secure? What Every Website Owner Needs To Know

It’s important to note that, in the case of the brute-force botnet attack described above, was no specific vulnerability in WordPress being exploited (the same script was also targeting sites built using other applications like Joomla).

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, made this comment about the botnet attacks:

It is a “simple” script that attempts to login using the admin login and a generated password. So if your password is too short or based on dictionary words it will be guessed and then the script can login legitimately and do whatever it wants including installing scripts (as plugins) or editing files. The attack tries to guess your password, if it succeeds, the most secure site in the world is wide open because they have your password.

(MikeLittle.org)

Preventing Your WordPress Website From Being Brute-Force Attacked – 10 Security Points

You may think that your site is of no interest to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, all websites are an opportunity to benefit or profit at your expense.

If hackers can find a way to access and take over your web site, that website or blog can then be employed to target other valued websites.

Additional undesirable impacts of having your website hacked include getting blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links promoting things like gambling, cheap offers on brand names, etc. in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing information or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasty things.

The harsh reality is that software-driven bots are most likely looking for weaknesses and trying to hack into your site right now. Whether they will successfully break in or not, depends on how hard or easy you will make things for them to continue trying until they either can discover a way to break in, or give up and decide to look for a less protected target.

How Much Information About Your Site Are You Broadcasting To Hackers?

Does your website run on WordPress? If so visit a site like Hackertarget.com and run your site through their WordPress security scan …

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Scan Image source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the scan returns a number of results and information about your site …

(WordPress security scan results. Product image: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the above tool that if you are able to see all of this information about your WordPress website, hackers can too.

(Image source: Blog Defender)

Being able to see which version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed on your site, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories can be potentially valuable information to hackers, as these can inform them about any exploitable vulnerabilities, especially where the owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you’re not taking steps to harden your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some time in the near future, someone will attempt to hack your website, because these attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Whenever a site is compromised, site owners can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been modified or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most sites will be infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner even being aware of it.

To help avoid the heartache of having your web site being hacked into, below are ten simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from brute-force botnet attacks.

Note: A few of the recommended measures below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress or server files. If you have no web coding skills, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Hosting Company

Get in touch with your hosting service and ask them what precautions have been put in place to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what they do to make sure that your WordPress sites get backed up.

Check that your webhosting service provider is regularly backing up your sites and that, if anything should happen, you can quickly and easily get your files back.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Regular WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Regularly Up-To-Date

Never rely on your hosting provider for site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain your WordPress site or pay someone to get this service done for you and develop a habit of performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine on a regular basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc …)

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

• All unnecessary data and files are deleted,
• All WP files and data are free of errors, optimized and backed up,
• All WordPress plugins, themes and software components are up-to-date,
• etc …

A complete WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP web site fully backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Image source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress site regularly backed up and updated is. WordPress site maintenance is not hard to do or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website. If you don’t want to learn how to do WordPress site maintenance yourself, get someone else to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your site is the next most important thing you must do after making sure that you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many WordPress plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Back Up, Copy & Protect Your WP Websites With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

Security Measure #3 – Do Not Use “Admin” As The Admin Username

The mass brute-force attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise site admin panels and gain access to sites by exploiting installations with “admin” as their account name.

For reasons of website security, never install WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is admin, you will need to change it immediately.

For a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username, go here: How To Change Your WordPress Admin Username

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually hits a login or password field with different strings of characters in an attempt to guess the right combination that will unlock your site.

Unless you put some measure in place to block the brute force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually works out the combination.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, become really easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string that is at least eight characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (%^#$@&*).

Roboform is a password program you can use to create different unbreakable passwords …

(You can use a password tool like Roboform to help you generate unguessable passwords)

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your password here: Changing Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To Your wp-config.php File

The wp-config.php file allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data and is used to define advanced options for WordPress.

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your WordPress site, they will normally search for your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains important information about your site’s database, security keys, etc. Getting access to this information would allow a hacker to change anything in your database, create a user account, upload files and take control of your site.

To protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent people from accessing your wp-config.php file. This requires knowing how to edit database information, move files around in your server and changing access permissions.

Security Measure #6 – Delete Or Rename Unnecessary Site Installation Files

Rename or delete your install.php, upgrade.php and readme.html files.

These files are not required after installation. If you don’t want to remove these files, just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Update Your WordPress Files, Plugins And Themes

Hackers search for vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress that they can exploit, including out-of-date versions of WordPress plugins and themes.

Make sure to keep all of your application files, plugins, themes, etc. up-to-date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable The Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor that lets the site administrator edit theme and plugin code from the dashboard area.

You can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor in your dashboard menu …

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor using the WordPress admin menu)

This allows anyone accessing your site to view and change your WordPress files, and cause havoc on your site.

If you want to prevent unauthorized people from being able to access your WordPress Theme editor, you will need to disable it. This can be done by adding code to your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Protect The WordPress Uploads Directory

The WordPress “uploads” folder stores all the media that gets uploaded to your WordPress site.

Normally, this folder is visible to online users. All someone has to do to see all of the contents stored in your site’s “uploads” directory is visit your directory using their browser …

(WordPress has an uploads folder where media content is stored)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, this can threaten the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent online users from accessing your ‘uploads’ folder and other important directories. This can be done using plugins, setting file permissions, uploading a blank index.php file (this is literally a blank file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to seek professional help if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

A number of security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address many common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing hackers from accessing your site, protecting your files from botnets, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

Many WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One plugin that does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and causing damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – complete security software solution for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of addressing most of the security issues that WordPress users need to address.

Another plugin you may want to look at using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender Security Solution For WordPress Web Sites

(Blog Defender)

Blog Defender is a suite of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus a WordPress security PDF/DOC file.

BlogDefender scans you WordPress site for security weaknesses …

And lets you fix these quickly and easily …

If you don’t want to buy a security plugin like SecureScanPro or BlogDefender, you can use various free plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a very secure platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like making sure that your WordPress installation, WP plugins and themes are kept updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to malicious by hackers and bots.

Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your site is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.

As a final reminder of the importance of keeping your websites protected, below is the advice given by an expert on website security to all WordPress users following the mass brute-force attacks on WordPress in 2013 …

Owners of websites based on WordPress CMS must improve at least basic security settings and implement best practices such as the use of robust passwords and the accurate management of “admin” accounts.

Pierluigi Paganini, Chief Information Security Officer, Security Affairs

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As you can see, WordPress security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article will help prevent brute-force attacks on your WordPress site. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please seek help from a professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified whenever we publish new information on WordPress security and tutorials about new security plugins.

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