When you are the leading CMS platform in the world and the preferred online publishing platform for millions of websites and loved by thousands of web developers and website designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will come under attack by hackers.

In early 2013 a worldwide brute-force attack struck WordPress installations on almost every WP hosting server in existence.

These attacks were caused by botnets (computers infected with viruses and programmed to attack other sites with security vulnerabilities).

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

What Is A Brute Force Attack?

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 WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. To do this, hackers use software programs and scripts that can guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re using easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, your site can be an easy target for hacking attempts.

This is called a “brute-force” 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)

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

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails from the infected computers of compromised user accounts.

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 infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009 called “Zeus” …

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

These were well organized and highly distributed botnet attacks. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of hosting companies in the initial attack alone, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress site admin areas. The mass attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked every day.

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

(WordPress powers millions of sites around the world, which makes it a target for hacking)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

No. In fact, there are many great reasons why you should choose WordPress if you are concerned at all about website security.

We explain what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites in this article: Is WordPress A Secure Platform For Websites?

It’s important to note that, in the case of April 2013 mass brute-force botnet attack described above, was no specific vulnerability in WordPress 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, 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)

Protecting Your WordPress Website From Being Brute Force Attacked – 10 Security Measures

Every blog with a vulnerability can present an opportunity to hackers. No website is completely safe from cyber attacks. Large, medium and small business web sites, personal blogs, government sites … even web sites owned by web security and anti-hacking experts can and have been targeted.

If a hacker can break in and gain access and control of your web site, that website can then be employed as a “bot” to attack larger and more highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable results of being hacked include getting blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links promoting things like gambling, porn, etc. inserted into your content and meta data, redirecting visitors to phishing sites or other websites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious scripts on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasty things.

The harsh reality is that malicious bots are most likely trying to hack into your website while you are reading this article right now. Whether they will achieve this will depend on how hard you can make it for hackers and bots to keep trying until they work out how to get in, or are forced to give up and go look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(WP Security Scan Image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will display various results and information about your WordPress installation …

(Hackertarget – WP security check results. Product image source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot source: Blog Defender)

Being able to see what version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories are all potentially valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially where the owners haven’t updated their files.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you are not precautionary 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 installations all the world!

Whenever a website or blog gets compromised, website owners can find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or even that their content has been completely 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 help avoid the heartache and frustration (and significant loss of valuable business data) that comes with having your web site 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 below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and server files. If you have no technical skills, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Host

Get in touch with your webhosting provider and ask them what security measures are in place to help prevent your site from brute force attacks, and what they do to ensure that your site files get regularly backed up.

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

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Site Regularly Up-To-Date

You should never rely just on your hosting company for your 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 on a regular basis (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WP installation regularly backed up and updated 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 WP site maintenance yourself, pay someone to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your website is the next most important thing you should do after making sure that you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many free and paid plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Backup, Duplicate And Keep Your WordPress Websites And Blogs Protected With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The large scale brute force attack on WordPress is mostly attempting to compromise site admin panels by exploiting sites with “admin” as their account name.

For reasons of website security, avoid setting up a WordPress site with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s username is admin, then change this immediately.

We have created a step-by-step tutorial for WordPress admin users on how to change your login username here: How To Change Your WordPress Admin User Name

Security Measure #4 – Change Your Password

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

Unless some measure is put into 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 persist in attacking your site until it eventually “cracks” the code.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, are very 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 that lets you create different unbreakable passwords …

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

We have created a detailed step-by-step tutorial for admin users on how to change your password here: How To Reset The Login Password

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

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

(WordPress WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your WordPress website, they will normally try to access your 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 them 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 people 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 – Delete Or Rename Unnecessary Site Installation Files

Rename or delete 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, then just rename them.

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

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor feature that allows administrators to edit plugin and theme code from the dashboard area.

In WordPress, 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)

The WordPress theme editor allows anyone accessing your site to view and modify your WP theme files, and cause havoc 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 – Secure Your Site’s Uploads Directory

The “uploads” directory contains all the media files that get uploaded to your website.

Normally, this folder is visible to anyone online. All a person needs to do to view the contents in the “uploads” directory is navigate to your directory using a web browser …

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, anyone could upload unauthorized file types or 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 an empty file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to hire a professional if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

There are several WordPress security plugins available that specifically address most common security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your site from malicious scripts, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

Most 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 potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and causing irreparable damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WP total security plugin)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of fixing 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 Plugin For WordPress Websites & Blogs

(Blog Defender)

This product is a package of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus a WordPress security PDF/DOC file.

BlogDefender shows you where the security holes in your web site are …

And then shows you how to 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 basic maintenance tasks like keeping your WordPress core files, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes up-to-date, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to attacks by hackers and bots.

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

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on web security to all WordPress users after the worldwide 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, WordPress security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article will help 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 service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, do yourself a favor and subscribe to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications via email when we publish new information on WordPress security and reviews of WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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