When you are the world’s most popular CMS platform 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 target for attacks by hackers wanting to score a “big win”.

In April 2013 a worldwide brute force attack struck WordPress installations on almost every web host in existence around the world.

These attacks were caused by computers infected with viruses and programmed to attack other vulnerable installations (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 will attempt to break into WordPress sites is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is achieved using software programs and scripts that can guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re using obvious login details, your website could be easily hacked by persistent attempts to guess 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)

A “Botnet” is a network of private computers that have been infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware of this.

Botnets are typically used to blast out mass spam emails.

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

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

The ongoing botnet attacks on WordPress were well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of hosting companies in the initial attack, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users admin areas took place. The mass attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked per day.

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

(WordPress is often the target of mass malicious attacks by hackers)

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

No. In fact, there are lots of good reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your online presence.

To learn why WordPress is a secure platform for websites, see this article: Is WordPress Secure?

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress, said this 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 Website From Being Brute Force Attacked – Ten Security Checks

You may think that the information in your website has nothing to offer to hackers, but the reality is that all websites are valuable to a malicious user.

If someone can access and control your blog, the site can then be employed as a “bot” to attack larger and more highly-valued websites.

Additional undesirable impacts of being hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links advertising things like viagra, porn, etc. in your content and meta data, malicious redirects to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing information or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasty things.

The reality is that hackers are probably trying to break into your web site as you are reading this article. Whether they can get in successfully or not, depends on how hard or easy you will make it for hackers to keep trying until they can discover how to get access, or give up and decide to look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Scan Product image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the scan will display various results and information about your site …

(WordPress security scan results. Product image source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot source: BlogDefender.com)

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 are all useful information to hackers, as this informs them about potential vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you are not preventive steps to bullet-proof your site, 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!

When a website is hacked, website owners will find themselves “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, most sites will become infected with malicious software without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

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

Note: Some of the measures below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you have no web coding skills, 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 Host

Get in touch with your host and ask them what security measures have been put into place to protect your site from brute-force attacks, and what they do to ensure that your WordPress sites are regularly being backed up.

It’s important to check that your hosting company backs up your server files and that, if anything happens, you can quickly and easily get your site back.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Website Or Blog Frequently Maintained

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WP maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP website or blog regularly backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Screenshot image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WP installation fully backed up and updated is. 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, pay someone to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your website is the next most important thing you must do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your files manually, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Backup, Copy And Keep Your WP Site Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly attempting to compromise website admin panels by exploiting sites using “admin” as the account name.

For website security purposes, avoid installing sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area hackers will test. If your site’s username is “admin”, then make sure you change this immediately.

For a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your admin username, go here: Changing Your WordPress Admin Username To A More Secure User Name

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

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

Unless some measure is put into place to stop the brute force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually gets access.

Weak passwords, therefore, become really easy targets for attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string that contains at least eight characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, combined with a few “special” characters (%^#$@&*).

Roboform is a password software you can use to create strong login passwords …

(Roboform is a password program you can use to generate very secure passwords)

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to change your admin password, go here: Changing Login Passwords In WordPress

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To Your wp-config.php File

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

(WordPress WP Config file)

If hackers break into your WordPress site, they will look for 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 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, you must prevent your wp-config.php file from being easily 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

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

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 – Upgrade Your WordPress Files, Plugins And Themes

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

Ensure that all of your software 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 lets the administrator edit plugin and theme files from the dashboard area.

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

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

This allows anyone accessing your site’s admin to view and modify your WP theme templates, and cause havoc on your site.

To prevent people from being able to access 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 – Remove Access To Your WordPress Uploads Folder

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

Normally, this folder is visible to online users. All a person needs to do to see all of the contents in your site’s “uploads” folder is navigate to your directory using a 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 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 help from someone who knows what they are doing if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Install Security Plugins

Several security plugins for WordPress are available that will address most common security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your files from malicious scripts, preventing unauthorized file uploads, 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 potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WordPress total security software solution)

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

Another plugin you may want to consider using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender Security Product Suite For WordPress

(Blog Defender WordPress Security Solution)

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

BlogDefender scans you WordPress site for security holes …

And then shows you how to fix these quickly and easily …

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

WordPress is a very secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like making sure that your WordPress software, WP plugins and themes are kept updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

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

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on website security to all WordPress users following the mass 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, the above information has given you the initial guidelines and direction you need to prevent brute force attacks on your WordPress site. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please consult a professional 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 via email whenever we publish new information on WordPress security and reviews of WordPress security plugins.

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