When you are the world’s most popular content management system and the preferred online publishing platform for millions of websites and loved by thousands of website developers and website designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will become a prime target for attacks from hackers.

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

These attacks were caused by botnets (infected computer networks programmed to attack other computers with security vulnerabilities).

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

Brute-Force Attacks – Definition

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’s administration login username and password. This can be done using software programs that can work through hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using weak user names and predictable passwords, your site could be easily hacked by repeated attempts to work out your site’s login details.

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.org)

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

Botnets are typically used to send mass spam emails from computers of compromised user accounts.

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

(ZeuS is a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the globe since 2009. Image: SecureList.com)

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

Coverage of this brute force botnet attack was reported by all the major webhosting companiesand 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 the world’s most used content management system which makes it a frequent target for attempted 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 continue using WordPress if you are concerned about the security of your website.

To understand what makes WordPress a very secure web platform, see this article: Concerned About WordPress Security? What Every Business Owner Needs To Know About WordPress

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress, 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)

How To Protect Your WordPress Blog From Being Brute Force Attacked – 10 Security Points

Every website or blog with a vulnerability can present an opportunity to hackers. A vulnerable blog not only offers hackers opportunities to improve their hacking skills and win “respect” from their peers, but it can also serve as a valuable platform for DDoS attacks, spreading malware and information theft.

If a hacker can exploit a software vulnerability in your security, your web site can then be used as a “bot” to attack larger and more highly-valued websites.

Additional undesirable results of being hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links advertising things like viagra, porn, etc. in your content and page title and descriptions, redirecting visitors 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 malicious bots are probably scouring for vulnerabilities and trying to break into your website or blog while you are reading this page. Whether they can achieve this or not, will depend on how hard or easy you will make it for hackers and botnets to continue persisting until they either discover how to get access, or are forced to give up and go look for an easier target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – Website Security Check Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the scan returns a number of results and details about your website …

(Hackertarget – WP security scan results. Screenshot image: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the tool shown above that if you are able to freely access all of this information, hackers can too.

(Screenshot source: Blog Defender)

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 can be potentially valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially where site owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you are not taking steps to bolster the security of your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some time in the near future, someone will attempt to hack your site, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations worldwide!

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

To avoid the heartache (and potential financial loss) that comes with discovering that your website has been hacked into, we have listed below 10 essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from botnet attacks.

Note: A few of the recommended steps below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you lack these technical skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for assistance.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Host

Get in touch with your webhosting service provider and ask them what security measures have been put in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to make sure that your server files and data get backed up.

It is important to make sure that your webhosting provider is backing up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can quickly and easily recover your files and data.

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

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WP installation 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 do not want to learn how to do WordPress 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 your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Duplicate & Protect Your WP Web Sites With Backup Creator Plugin For WP

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

The mass brute force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise site admin panels by exploiting installations that used “admin” as their account name.

For website security purposes, don’t set up WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s user name is admin, then make sure you change it immediately.

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

Security Measure #4 – Choose Strong Passwords

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

Unless you put some measure in place to prevent the brute force attack (see further below for a couple of simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just continue attacking your site until it eventually “cracks” the code.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, are very easy targets for hacking attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string that contains at least 8 characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, and “special” characters (e.g. ^, $, @, etc).

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

(You can use a password management program like Roboform to generate strong login passwords)

For a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your password, go here: How To Reset Your WordPress Password

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To 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 options for WordPress.

(wp-config.php)

If a hacker breaks into your website, they will normally look for your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your 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.

In order 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 – Delete Or Rename Unnecessary Site Installation Files

Delete or rename 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, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Upgrade Your WordPress Installation, Themes And Plugins To Their Latest Version

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

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

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

The WordPress theme editor feature allows anyone accessing your blog’s admin area to view and change your theme templates, and 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 – Prevent Access To Your WordPress Uploads Folder

The “uploads” folder contains all the media files that get uploaded to your blog.

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

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this can become a serious threat to 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 a file with nothing in it called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to get professional assistance if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

Several WordPress security plugins are available that specifically address most common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your site from botnets, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – WP total security software)

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

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

Blog Defender Security Product Suite

(Blog Defender Security Product Suite For WordPress)

This product is a suite of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus WordPress security documentation in PDF and DOC formats.

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

And then shows you how to fix these quickly …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like keeping your WordPress installation, plugins and WordPress themes up-to-date, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to attacks 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, web security is something you cannot ignore.

As one last reminder of the importance of keeping your websites protected, below is the advice given by an expert on web security to all WordPress users after the large-scale brute-force attacks by botnets 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, this article has shown you what to do 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 professional WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to be notified when we publish new tutorials on WordPress security and reviews of new WordPress security plugins.

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