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

In 2013 a large-scale brute force attack began hitting WordPress installations on virtually every WP hosting server in existence around the world.

These attacks were caused by infected computer networks programmed to attack other computers (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 will attempt to break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This can be done with software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your website can be an easy target for hacking attempts.

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

Botnet Definition

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 private computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious scripts or software, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware that this is going on inside their device.

Botnets are often used to send 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 globe since 2009 called “Zeus” …

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

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

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

(WordPress often is targeted by hackers)

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 choose WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your website.

We explain why WordPress is a secure web platform in this article: How Secure Is WordPress?

It’s important to understand that, in the case of April 2013 brute force botnet attack described above, there was no WordPress vulnerability being exploited (the same script was also targeting sites built using other web applications 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 Brute-Force Attacks – 10 Security Measures

You may think that the information in your site provides little to no value to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website is an opportunity to benefit at your expense.

If a malicious user can hack and remotely take control of your website, the website can then be employed to target more valued web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of having your site hacked include getting blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links advertising things like viagra, discounted fashion, etc. in your content and page title and descriptions, malicious redirects to phishing sites and other websites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious software on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasties.

The reality is that software-driven bots are most likely looking for vulnerabilities and trying to break into your website or blog at this very moment. Whether they can break into your site will depend on how difficult you have made things for hackers and bots to continue trying until they either can find a way to get access, or are forced to give up and decide to look for a less secure target.

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

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

(WordPress Security Scan Screenshot: Hackertarget.com)

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

(WP security scan results. Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image: Blog Defender)

Being able 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 in your site can all be potentially valuable information to hackers, as these can inform them about exploitable security weaknesses, especially where the owners haven’t updated their files.

If your site or blog is driven by WordPress and you are not taking steps to bolster the security of your site, then it’s practically guaranteed that, at some time in the near future, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these brute force attacks are systematically targeting WordPress sites worldwide!

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

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

Note: Some of the recommended steps below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you are not technical-minded, 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 – Contact Your Web Host

Contact your web host and ask them what measures they offer to protect your site from botnet attacks, and what they do to make sure that your site files are regularly being backed up.

It’s important to check that your webhosting service regularly backs up your server files 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 Or Blog Frequently Updated

You should never rely just on your web host for site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain your WordPress site or pay someone to get this service done for you and maintain a habit of religiously performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine frequently (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc …)

A full 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 WP plugins, themes and software components are up-to-date,
• etc …

A complete WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP web site regularly backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WP installation completely backed up and up-to-date is. WP maintenance is not hard or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website or blog. 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 website is the second most important thing you must do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Clone & Keep Your WordPress Sites Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The mass brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise site admin panels and gain access to the site by exploiting WordPress sites with “admin” as the user name.

For reasons of website security, don’t install WordPress sites with the username admin. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s user name is “admin”, you should change it immediately.

We have created a simple tutorial on how to change your WordPress admin username here: Changing Your WP Admin Username To Another Username

Security Measure #4 – Change Your Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually and persistently tries to guess the right username and password character string that will give the hacker access to your website.

Unless you put some measure in 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 keep attacking your site until it eventually breaks into your admin area.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, are very easy targets for brute force attacks. Make sure that you change your password to something that contains at least 8 characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. %, $, &, etc).

You can use a password management tool like Roboform to help you generate hard-to-crack passwords …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to help you generate difficult passwords)

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to change your password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Passwords In WordPress

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

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

(WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your WordPress website, they will normally look for your wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database details, security keys, etc. Getting access to this information would allow someone to change anything in your database, create a user account, upload files and take control of your site.

To protect your WordPress site from being attacked 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 – Rename Or Delete Unnecessary Installation Files

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

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

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

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

Make sure to keep your files, themes, plugins, etc. 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 inside the dashboard.

You can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor from the admin menu …

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

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your blog’s admin view and modify your WP theme template files, or cause havoc on your site.

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

Security Measure #9 – Protect The WordPress Uploads Directory

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

Normally, this folder is visible to online users. All someone has to do to view all of the contents in your site’s “uploads” folder is navigate to your 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, someone could upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent online users from viewing 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 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 not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Install Security Plugins

There are some great WordPress security plugins available that specifically address many common security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your website from brute-force attacks, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – WordPress total security plugin)

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

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

Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite

(Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin)

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 potential security vulnerabilities …

And lets you fix these quickly …

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

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting basic maintenance tasks like keeping your WordPress installation, plugins and themes up-to-date, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website 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 simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by a website security expert 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 very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, this information 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 WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications when we publish new information on WordPress security and reviews of WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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