WordPress is often the target of attacks by hackers, due to its popularity.

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

These attacks were caused by infected computer networks programmed to attack other sites, also commonly known as “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)

There are many methods hackers use to try and break into WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is achieved using scripts and tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable user names and passwords that are easy to guess, your website could be easily hacked by the script’s persistent attempts to work out your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” 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)

”Botnets” are networks of private computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, typically without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware that this is happening inside their device.

Botnets are regularly used to blast out 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 world 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 a number of webhosting companies in the initial attack alone, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users administration areas occurred. The mass attack continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites and blogs being hacked each day.

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

(WordPress is the world’s most used content management system making it an obvious target for hacker attacks)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

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

We explain what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites in this article: Can You Build A Secure Business Online Using WordPress?

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

Mike Little, the co-founder 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)

How To Protect Your WordPress Site From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Points

You may think that your website or blog is of no interest to hackers, but the reality is that every website is valuable to a malicious user.

If a hacker can discover a vulnerability, the website or blog can then be used to attack more valued web sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of being hacked include getting blacklisted by Google, having spammy links promoting things like viagra, discounted fashion, etc. in your content, malicious redirects to phishing sites or other websites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasties.

The harsh reality is that hackers are most likely trying to break into your web site as you are reading this page. Whether they will hack in or not, depends on how difficult you have made it for hackers to continue persisting until they can either find how to get access, or give up and decide to look for an easier target.

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

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

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

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

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

It should be obvious after using this scanning tool that if you are able to see all of this information, so can hackers.

(Product image 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 on your server are all useful information to hackers, as these can inform them about potentially exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your website runs on WordPress and you’re not taking steps to toughen up your site, 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 targeting WordPress installations worldwide!

When a website or blog gets broken into, webmasters 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. Often, sites will be infected with malicious software without the owner even being aware that this has taken place.

To avoid the heartache and frustration (and potential financial loss) that comes with having your website or blog being hacked into, we have listed below 10 essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

Note: Some of the measures shown below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you have no web skills, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Webhosting Provider

Contact your hosting service and ask them exactly what systems are in place to help prevent your site from brute force attacks, and what is done to make sure that your files and data get backed up.

Check that your webhosting provider backs up your sites and that, if anything happens, you can easily get back your files.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Regular WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Frequently Maintained

Never rely just on your webhosting service 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 religiously performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine on a frequent basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc …)

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WP web site 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 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 should do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are a number of free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your site backups here: Back Up, Clone & Protect Your WordPress Web Sites With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The large scale brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise site admin panels by exploiting installations with “admin” as their user name.

For website security reasons, never set up a WordPress site with the username admin. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your site’s user name is admin, then make sure you change it immediately.

We have created a tutorial on how to change your username here: Changing Your WordPress User Name From Admin To A More Secure Username

Security Measure #4 – Use A Strong Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually hits a username and password field with different character strings in an attempt to guess the right login combination that will unlock your website.

Unless some measure is put into place to prevent the brute force attack (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just continue attacking your site until it eventually works out the combination.

Weak passwords, therefore, become very easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string that is at least 8 or 9 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and “special” characters (e.g. %, $, *, etc).

You can use a password management tool like Roboform to generate difficult passwords …

(You can use a password tool like Roboform to generate difficult passwords)

We have created a step-by-step tutorial created especially for WP admin users on how to change your login password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Passwords

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

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

(WordPress WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your website, they will try to access the wp-config.php file, because this file 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.

In order to protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, you must prevent people viewing 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

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 delete these files, just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Keep Your WordPress Blog, Themes And Plugins Up-To-Date

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

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

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

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

This allows anyone accessing your blog to view and modify your WordPress theme templates, or cause mayhem on your site.

If you want to prevent people from accessing 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 – Protect The Site’s Uploads Directory

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

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

(WordPress has an uploads folder where your media files are stored)

If any directories in your website have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this could compromise the security of your website.

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, adding 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 use a professional if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

There are some great WordPress security plugins available that specifically address many common security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your website from brute-force attacks, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – security software for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and takes care of 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

(Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite)

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

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

And lets you quickly and easily fix these …

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

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like keeping your WP installation, plugins and WordPress themes updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to malicious by hackers and bots.

Regardless of the type 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 website security.

As a final reminder of the importance of keeping your websites protected, below is the advice given by a security expert to all WordPress users after 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 of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has provided you with the initial guidelines and direction you need 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 technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications whenever we publish new tutorials on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins.

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