WordPress often is targeted by hackers, due to its global popularity.

In April 2013 a worldwide brute force attack struck WordPress installations across virtually every host server in existence.

These attacks were caused by infected computer networks programmed to attack other sites (called “botnets”).

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’s administration login username and password. This can be achieved with software tools that can guess hundreds of login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using weak user names and predictable passwords, your website can be an easy target for hackers.

This is called a “brute force” login 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)

A “Botnet” is a network of computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious scripts or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners’ knowledge.

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails from the infected computers of unsuspecting users.

The screenshot below was taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009 …

(ZeuS is a botnet that has been actively infecting computer networks all around the world since 2009. Source: SecureList.com)

These ongoing botnet attacks on WordPress are well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several hosting companies just in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users administration areas. The brute force attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites and blogs being hacked per day.

News of this mass 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 …

(Being the world’s most popular CMS makes WordPress a target for hacking attacks)

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

No. In fact, there are lots of very good reasons why you should use WordPress if you are concerned about the security of your online business.

To understand why WordPress is a secure platform for websites, see this article: Concerned About WordPress Security? What Every Website Owner Needs To Know

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, made the following comment 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 Site From Brute Force Attacks – 10 Security Measures

You may think that your website has no significant value to hackers, but the reality is that every website has some value to a malicious user.

If a malicious user can hack and remotely take control of your website or blog, your website or blog can then be used as a “bot” to attack more highly-valued websites.

Additional undesirable consequences of having your site hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by Google, having spammy links promoting things like casinos, discounted fashion, etc. inserted into your content and meta data, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasties.

The reality is that malicious bots are very likely searching for security weaknesses and trying to hack into your web site right now. Whether they can get into your site successfully or not, will depend on how hard you have made it for them to continue trying until they discover how to get in, or are forced to decide to look for a more vulnerable 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 website through their WordPress security scan …

(WP Security Scan Image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the test will yield a number of results and details about your site setup …

(Hackertarget – WordPress security scan results. Product 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 site, hackers can too.

(Source: BlogDefender.com)

The ability to see what 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 are all useful information to hackers, as this can inform them about any holes or weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you’re not precautionary steps to bullet-proof your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some point, someone will attempt to hack your installation, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations worldwide!

Whenever a website is compromised, website owners will find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most compromised sites will be infected with malicious software without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To avoid the heartache (and potential loss of valuable business data) of discovering that your site has been hacked into, we have listed below ten simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to prevent your WordPress site from being brute-force attacked.

Note: A few of the measures shown below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you are not technical, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Host

Contact your webhosting service and ask them exactly what precautions they offer to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what is done to make sure that your files and data get regularly backed up.

Check that your hosting provider regularly backs up your sites and that, if anything happens, you can quickly and easily get your files and data back.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Website Regularly Updated

Never rely just on your hosting provider for your site backups. Instead, learn how to manage your WordPress site or get this done for you and develop a habit of performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine frequently (e.g. daily, weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WP maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress web site completely backed up and up-to-date is. 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 WP maintenance yourself, get someone else to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your site is the next most important thing you should do after making sure that your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to back up your site manually, there are many free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your site backups here: Back Up, Copy & Keep Your WP Website Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise website administrator panels by exploiting sites using “admin” as their account name.

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

We have created a tutorial that shows you how to change your admin username here: Changing Your WordPress Admin Username

Security Measure #4 – Use A Strong Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software persistently tries to guess the right combination of characters in a username and password 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 simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just continue to attack your site until it eventually breaks into your admin area.

Weak passwords, therefore, are very easy targets for attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string containing at least eight characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. %, $, @, etc).

Roboform is a password software you can use to create different hard-to-crack passwords …

(Roboform is a password management tool you can use to help you generate different secure passwords)

We have created a step-by-step tutorial created especially for WordPress users that shows you how to change your admin password here: What To Do If You Need To Change Your Password

Security Measure #5 – Deny Access To Your WP Config File

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

(WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your website, they will search for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database information, 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 your wp-config.php file from being accessible. This requires knowing how to edit database information, move files around in your server and changing access permissions.

Security Measure #6 – Rename Or Delete Unnecessary Installation Files

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

You can remove these files after installation, as they are unnecessary. If you don’t want to remove these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Update Your WordPress Files, Plugins & Themes To Their Latest Version

Hackers are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities they can exploit in earlier versions of WordPress, including outdated versions of WordPress plugins and themes.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor feature that lets the site administrator edit theme and plugin files inside the dashboard.

In WordPress, you can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor in the admin menu …

(The WordPress theme editor can be accessed via the WP dashboard menu)

The WordPress theme editor allows anyone accessing your site to view and edit your WordPress files, or cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent people from accessing 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 Your Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any files stored in his folder have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, this could seriously 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, adding 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 get professional help if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

Some great security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address many common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital areas of your site, protecting your files from brute-force attacks, preventing injections of code into files, 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 issues that could lead to hackers accessing your website files and causing damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WordPress total security software)

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

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

Blog Defender Security Plugin

(Blog Defender Security Plugin For WordPress)

Blog Defender is a package of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus WordPress security documentation in PDF and DOC formats.

BlogDefender shows you where the security weaknesses in your WordPress site are …

And lets you fix these quickly …

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

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

Regardless of the kind 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 web security.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by a website security expert to all WordPress users following the global 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, website security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article will help keep your WordPress site protected from brute-force attacks. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please consult a WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, remember subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified via email whenever we publish new tips on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins.

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