WordPress is the world’s most used content management system which makes it an easy target for attempted hacker attacks.

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

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

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

Brute-Force Attacks – An Overview

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)

There are many ways hackers try to break into a WordPress site. One of these is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is done with software tools that can work through hundreds of possible login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using weak user names and passwords, your website can be easily hacked by a malicious script’s persistent attempts to work out your site’s login details.

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

Botnets

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)

”Botnets” are networks of computers that have been infected with malicious code or software, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

Botnets are regularly used to send mass spam emails.

Below is a screenshot taken from an internet security monitoring site showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009 …

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

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

News of the April 2013 brute force attack was widely reported in all of the major webhosting companies, as well as the leading technology publications, such as Forbes, TechNews Daily, BBC News, Tech Crunch, PC Magazine, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(WordPress is frequently the target of attacks by hackers)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

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 web presence.

To learn what makes WordPress a very secure web platform, see this article: Is WordPress A Secure Platform For Websites?

It’s important to note that, in the case of April 2013 worldwide brute-force attack described above, was no specific vulnerability in WordPress being exploited (the same script was also attacking sites built using platforms like Joomla).

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, 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)

Protecting Your WordPress Blog From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Measures

Every website with a vulnerability can can provide an opportunity to hackers. A vulnerable blog not only presents hackers opportunities to improve their skills and claim “bragging rights” amongst their peers, but it can also serve as a valuable resource for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, distributing malware and information theft.

If hackers can find a way to take over and control your blog, your web site can then be used to target other valuable web sites.

Additional undesirable results of being hacked include being blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links advertising things like viagra, cheap offers on brand names, etc. inserted into your content and page title and descriptions, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious scripts on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasties.

The truth is that malicious bots are probably trying to break into your web site right now. Whether they can get in successfully or not, depends on how hard or easy you have made it for hackers and botnets to continue trying until they can discover how to break in, or are forced to decide to look for a less protected target.

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

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

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

You will see that the test returns a number of results and information about your website …

(WordPress security scan results. Image source: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the tool shown above that if you are able to access all of this information about your website, then so can hackers.

(Image source: BlogDefender website)

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 in your site can all be potentially valuable information to hackers, as this can inform them about exploitable vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your site or blog is driven by WordPress and you’re not taking appropriate steps to toughen up your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your installation, because these brute-force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations worldwide!

Typically, whenever a website or blog gets hacked, site owners can discover much to their dismay that they have been “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 become infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner even being aware that this has occurred.

To help avoid the heartache and aggravation of discovering that your website has been hacked into, we have listed below 10 simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being attacked by brute force botnet hacking attempts.

Note: Some of the steps below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you are not technical, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or search for a professional WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Web Host

Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them exactly what precautions they have put into place to protect your site from botnet attacks, and what they do to make sure that your files and data are being regularly backed up.

Check that your web host regularly backs up your sites and that, if anything goes wrong, you can easily get your site back.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Complete WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Or Blog Frequently Maintained

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

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WordPress website or blog fully backed up and up-to-date. WP site maintenance is not hard or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website. If you do not want to learn how to do WordPress maintenance yourself, pay a professional 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 many plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Backup, Clone & Protect Your WP Site With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The mass brute force attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise site admin panels by exploiting WordPress sites that used “admin” as the username.

For website security purposes, avoid setting up sites with the username admin. This is the first area hackers will test. If your blog’s username is “admin”, then change it immediately.

We have created a detailed tutorial on how to change your WordPress username here: How To Change Your Admin Username In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Your Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually tries to guess the right combination of characters in a password and username that will give them access to your site.

Unless some measure is put into place to block the brute-force attack (see further below for a couple of simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just continue to attack your site until it eventually gets access.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, make very easy targets for attacks. Make sure that you change your password to something containing at least eight or nine characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

If you have trouble coming up with strong passwords or you are reluctant to set up different passwords for all of your online logins, then use a password program like Roboform …

(Roboform is a password management tool that lets you generate different passwords)

We have created a detailed tutorial created especially for WordPress admin users that shows you how to change your admin password here: How To Reset Your Login Password

Security Measure #5 – Secure Your WP Config File

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

(WordPress WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your WordPress website, they will typically try to access 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 them to change anything in your database, create a user account, upload files and take control of your site.

In order to protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, 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 Site Installation Files

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

These files are not required after installation and can be removed. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

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

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

Make sure to keep your WordPress files, themes, plugins, etc. up-to-date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor that allows administrators to edit plugin and theme files from the dashboard area.

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the admin menu)

The WordPress theme editor lets anyone accessing your site’s admin view and edit your WordPress theme files, or create mayhem on your site.

If you want to prevent 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 – Secure The Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

(WordPress has an uploads directory where all of your media files are stored)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, anyone can upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent unauthorized people from viewing your ‘uploads’ folder and other important directories. This can be done using plugins, setting file permissions, adding a blank index.php file (this is literally a file with nothing in it called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to ask help from someone who knows what they are doing if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

There are a number of great security plugins for WordPress available that specifically address common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing hackers from accessing your site, protecting your site from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

Most 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 damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – total security software 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 plugin you may want to consider using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender shows you where potential security weaknesses in your WordPress installation are …

And lets you fix these quickly, easily and inexpensively …

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

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting basic maintenance tasks like updating your WordPress installation, WordPress plugins and WP themes, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to attacks by hackers and bots.

No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by a web security expert to all WordPress users following the mass brute-force attacks 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, WordPress security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the above information has given you the initial steps you need to take to keep your WordPress site protected from brute-force attacks. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please seek help from a WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications via email whenever we publish new articles and tutorials on WordPress security and reviews of new security plugins and solutions.

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