WordPress powers millions of websites around the world, making it a target for malicious attempts by hackers.

In early 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to a worldwide brute force attack.

These attacks were caused by networks of infected computers programmed to attack other vulnerable installations (called “botnets”).

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

What Are 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 do this, hackers use software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable usernames and predictable passwords, your website could be an easy target for hackers.

This is called a “brute force” attack.

Botnet – What Is This?

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.org)

”Botnets” are networks of private computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners’ knowledge.

Botnets are typically used to blast out mass spam emails.

The screenshot below was 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 globe since 2009 called “Zeus” …

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

The botnet attacks were well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of webhosting companies in the initial attack alone, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress site administration areas occurred. The large-scale attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked per day.

News of this worldwide brute force attack was widely reported in all of the major webhosting companiesand leading technology publications, such as Forbes, TechNews Daily, PC Magazine, BBC News, Tech Crunch, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(Being the world’s most used content management system makes WordPress a target for hacking attempts)

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

No. In fact, there are many great reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about website security.

To understand what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites, see this article: Are Open Source Platforms Like WordPress Secure?

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress, said this about the brute force 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)

How To Prevent Your WordPress Site From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Checks

You may think that the information in your website or blog provides no value to hackers, but the reality is that all websites are valuable to a malicious user.

If someone can find a security flaw that lets them compromise the control of your site, the website can then be employed as part of a larger network of “bots” to target other highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of having your website hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links advertising things like gambling, porn, etc. in your content and page title and descriptions, malicious redirects to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasty things.

The reality is that hackers are probably trying to break into your blog while you are reading this article at this very moment. Whether they can get in successfully depends on how difficult or easy you have made it for them to continue persisting until they find how to get in, or are forced to give up and decide to look for an easier target.

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

Do you own a WordPress site? If so, visit Hackertarget.com and run your website through their WordPress security scan …

(WP Security Scan Product image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will return a number of results and details about your website …

(Hackertarget – website security check results. Screenshot image: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot image: BlogDefender site)

The ability to see which version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories on your server can all be potentially valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you are not taking steps to bullet-proof your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some time in the near future, someone will attempt to hack your site, because these brute force attacks are systematically targeting WordPress sites all the world!

Typically, whenever a site is hacked, webmasters can find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been modified or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Often, most sites will be infected with malicious scripts without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache and frustration (and significant financial loss) that comes with having your web site being hacked into, we have listed below 10 simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

Note: Some of the recommended steps below require some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you have no web skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress technical provider for assistance.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Hosting Service Provider

Get in touch with your webhosting service provider and ask them what security systems are in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to ensure that your WordPress sites get regularly backed up.

Make sure that your webhosting service regularly backs up your sites and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily get your files back.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Website Regularly Up-To-Date

Never rely only on your webhosting company for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or get this service done for you and develop a habit of performing a complete site maintenance routine on a regular basis (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress website or blog frequently backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WordPress installation fully backed up and updated. WordPress 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 second most important thing you must do after making sure that your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to back up your files manually, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Back Up, Clone & Keep Your WordPress Web Site Protected With Backup Creator WP Plugin

Security Measure #3 – Make Sure That Your Username Is Not “Admin”

The brute force attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise site administrator panels by exploiting WordPress installations using “admin” as the user name.

For security purposes, never install WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your blog’s username is “admin”, change it immediately.

We have created a simple tutorial created especially for WordPress users on how to change your WordPress admin username here: How To Change Your WP Admin Username To A Different User Name

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually and persistently hits a username and password field with different character strings trying to guess the right combination that will give the hacker entry to your website.

Unless some measure is put into place to stop the brute-force attack (see further below for a couple of effective ways to do this), the “bot” will just continue to attack your site until it eventually works out the combination.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, are really easy targets for brute-force attacks. Make sure that you change your password to something that contains at least eight characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. ^, #, &, etc).

You can use a password software tool like Roboform to create unbreakable passwords …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to create strong passwords)

For a simple step-by-step tutorial for non-technical WordPress users that shows you how to change your WordPress admin password, go here: What To Do If You Need To Change Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Secure Your wp-config.php File

The wp-config.php file contains important information about your site’s database and is used to define advanced options for WordPress.

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your website, they will normally search for your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your WordPress database details, security keys, etc. Getting access to this information would allow them 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, you must prevent people getting to 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 Installation Files

Delete or rename the install.php, upgrade.php and readme.html files from your server.

These files are completely unnecessary after installation and can be deleted. If you don’t want to remove these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Keep Your WordPress Files, Themes & Plugins Up-To-Date

Hackers look for vulnerabilities in previous versions of WordPress that they can exploit, including outdated versions of WP themes and plugins.

Ensure that all of your installation files, themes, plugins, etc. are always up to date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

In WordPress, you can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor from your main menu …

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the WP dashboard menu)

The WordPress theme editor feature allows anyone accessing your blog’s admin to view and edit your WordPress theme files, and create havoc on your site.

To prevent unauthorized people from being able to access the 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 Your WordPress Uploads Folder

The “uploads” directory stores all the media files that get uploaded to your WordPress site.

By default, this folder is visible to anyone online. All a person needs to do to see all of the contents in your site’s “uploads” folder is visit your directory using their web browser …

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

If any files stored in his folder have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this can seriously threaten the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent unauthorized people 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 an empty file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to ask for assistance from someone who knows what they are doing if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

Some great WordPress security plugins are available that specifically address common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your website from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – total security plugin for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and fixes most of the security issues that WordPress users need to address.

Another great security plugin you may want to consider using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender WordPress Security Solution

(Blog Defender Security Solution)

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

BlogDefender scans you website for security vulnerabilities …

And lets you quickly fix these …

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

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WP installation, WordPress plugins and themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to malicious by hackers and bots.

No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.

As one last 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 global brute force attacks by botnets on WordPress in April 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, website security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has shown you what to do to 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 professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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

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