WordPress is often the target of attacks by hackers.

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

These attacks were caused by computers infected with malware and programmed to attack other computers, also commonly known as “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 use to try and break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. To do this, hackers use software programs and scripts that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable usernames and passwords that are easy to guess, your website could be easily hacked by a malicious script’s repeated attempts to work out your site’s login details.

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

What Is A Botnet?

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/botnet)

”Botnets” are networks of computers that have been infected with malicious code or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, typically without the computer owners’ knowledge.

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails from 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” …

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

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

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

(WordPress powers millions of websites and blogs worldwide, which makes it a natural target for hackers)

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

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

We explain why WordPress is a secure platform for websites in this article: Why WordPress Is A Secure Platform For Websites –

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, made this comment 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 Checks

Every web site with a vulnerability offers some degree of value to hackers. An unsecured site not only provides hackers opportunities to improve their hacking skills and win “respect” amongst their peers, but it can also be a valuable platform for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, distributing malware and engaging in information theft.

If a hacker can find a way to break in and gain stealth control of your website, the website or blog can then be employed to target more highly-valued sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of being hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links promoting things like online meds, discounted fashion, etc. inserted in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious programs on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasties.

The reality is that brute-force software bots are very likely scouring for vulnerabilities and trying to hack into your website while you are reading these very words. Whether they will successfully get into your site or not, will depend on how difficult you can make things for hackers to keep trying until they either find how to get access, or give up and go look for a less protected target.

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

If you visit Hackertarget.com and run your website through their WordPress security check …

(WP Security Scan Image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the test will display a number of results and details about your site …

(WordPress security check results. Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using this tool that if you can access all of this information, hackers can too.

(Source: BlogDefender site)

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

If your site or blog is driven by WordPress and you are not taking appropriate steps to harden 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 attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations all the world!

When a website gets broken into, site owners can discover much to their dismay that they have been “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Often, sites will be infected with malicious scripts without the owner even being aware that this has occurred.

To help avoid the heartache of discovering that your web site has been hacked into, below are ten essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

Note: Some of the steps below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you have no web skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or search for a WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Host

Contact your hosting service and ask them what security measures are in place to help prevent your site from botnet attacks, and what they do to ensure that your files and data get regularly backed up.

It is important to make sure that your hosting provider regularly backs up your sites and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily get your files and data back.

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

Never rely on your hosting provider for site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain 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. weekly, monthly, etc …)

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WordPress website fully backed up and updated. WP site 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, get someone else to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your site is the second 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 many free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Back Up, Duplicate And Keep Your WordPress Site Protected With Backup Creator Plugin For WP

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

the worldwide brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise website administrator panels by exploiting WordPress sites with “admin” as their user name.

For website security reasons, never set up sites with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your blog’s username is admin, change this immediately.

For a detailed tutorial on how to change your login username, go here: How To Change Your Admin Username In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Make Sure Your Password Is Strong

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

Unless you put some measure in place to block the brute-force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of effective ways to do this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually works out the combination.

Weak passwords, therefore, are very easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string that contains at least 8 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (%^#$@&*).

If you have trouble coming up with strong passwords or you are reluctant to set up different passwords for all of your online logins, then use a password management tool like Roboform …

(Roboform is a password software you can use to create different secure login passwords)

We have created a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Your WordPress Password

Security Measure #5 – Prevent The wp-config.php File From Being Found

The wp-config.php file allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data and is used to define advanced WordPress options.

(WordPress WP Config file)

If hackers break into your WordPress website, 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 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, you must 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 – 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 removed. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Update Your WordPress Files, Themes & Plugins To Their Latest Version

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

In WordPress, you can access your WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor in your dashboard menu …

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor using the dashboard menu)

This allows anyone accessing your blog’s admin area to view and change your WP theme template files, or cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent unauthorized 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 – Prevent Access To The WordPress Uploads Folder

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

By default, this folder is visible to online users. All someone has 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, this could compromise the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent unauthorized people from viewing 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 blank file 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 – Use Security Plugins

There are a number of security plugins for WordPress available that will address many common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your website from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, 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 issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and causing damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – security software solution for WordPress)

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

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

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender Security Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

And then shows you how to easily fix these …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like making sure that your WordPress installation, WordPress plugins and themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data security 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, securing your web site is something you cannot afford to ignore.

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 worldwide brute-force attacks 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, 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 professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications via email whenever we publish new tips on WordPress security and reviews of new security plugins.

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