Powering millions of sites around the world makes WordPress an easy target for attempted attacks by malicious users.

In early 2013 a large-scale brute-force attack struck WordPress installations on almost every host server in existence.

These attacks were caused by botnets (infected computer networks programmed to attack other installations with security vulnerabilities).

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

About 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. To achieve this, hackers use software tools that can guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re using predictable usernames and passwords, your site can be easily hacked by the software’s repeated attempts to work out your site’s login details.

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)

A “Botnet” is a network of computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious scripts or software code, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

Botnets are regularly used to send mass spam emails.

Below is a screenshot taken from an internet security monitoring site 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 world since 2009. Source: SecureList.com)

The ongoing botnet attacks on WordPress sites were highly distributed and well organized. 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 user admin areas. The mass attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked per day.

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

(Being the world’s most popular CMS makes WordPress an obvious target for hackers)

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

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

We explain what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites 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, no specific WordPress vulnerability was being exploited (the same script was also targeting sites built using other CMS platforms like Joomla).

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress, made the following 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 Blog From Brute Force Attacks – 10 Security Measures

Every website or blog with a security vulnerability offers some value to hackers. A compromised website not only offers hackers opportunities to improve their hacking skills and win “respect” amongst their peers, but it can also serve as a valuable platform for distributed attacks, spreading malware and participating in information theft.

If a hacker can exploit a vulnerability in the security system, your blog can then be used as a “bot” to attack more highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable effects of having your site hacked include getting blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links advertising things like casinos, cheap offers on brand names, etc. in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious software on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasty things.

The truth is that malicious bots are very likely scouring for exploits and trying to break into your web site right now. Whether they will break into your site depends on how difficult or easy you will make things for hackers to keep trying until they discover a way to get access, or are forced to decide to look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Check Source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the scan will return a number of results and details about your site …

(Hackertarget – WP security scan results. Source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot image: BlogDefender website)

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 in your site can all be valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any potential holes or weaknesses, especially where the owners haven’t updated their software versions.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you’re not proactive steps to harden your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your installation, because these attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Whenever a site is hacked, webmasters can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their content has been vandalized or that everything has been entirely wiped out. Often, compromised sites will become infected with malicious software without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache and aggravation (and significant loss of valuable business data) of having your website being hacked into, we have listed below 10 simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

Note: A few of the recommended steps shown below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or 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 a professional WordPress technical provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Webhosting Service

Contact your web host and ask them exactly what security systems have been put into place to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what is done to ensure that your server files get regularly backed up.

Make sure that your web host is regularly backing up your sites and that, if anything goes wrong, you can quickly and easily recover your files and data.

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

Never rely only on your host for your 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 performing a complete site maintenance routine on a frequent basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP site completely backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Screenshot source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress installation completely backed up and up-to-date 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 do not want to learn how to do WordPress site maintenance yourself, get someone else to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your site is the second most important thing you should do after making sure that you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to back up your files manually, there are a number of 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 Websites And Blogs With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

the worldwide brute force attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise website admin panels by exploiting sites that used “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 username is “admin”, you will need to change it immediately.

We have created a detailed tutorial for non-technical WordPress users that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username here: How To Change Your WP Admin Username To A More Secure User Name

Security Measure #4 – Your Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually and persistently hits a login or password field with different strings of characters trying to guess the right combination that will unlock your site.

Unless you put some measure in place to stop 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, make really easy targets for botnets. Make sure that you change your password to something containing at least eight characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and “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 program like Roboform …

(You can use a password management tool like Roboform to create hard-to-crack passwords)

For a detailed tutorial that shows you how to change your login password, go here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Your WordPress Password

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To Your WP Config File

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

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your WordPress website, they will look for 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 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 easily accessible. 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 Installation Files

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

These files are not required after installation and can be deleted. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

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

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor that lets site administrators edit theme and plugin files from the dashboard.

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

(The WordPress theme editor can be accessed using the main menu)

This means that anyone logging into your blog can see and modify all of your WordPress theme files, or create 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 editing your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Prevent Access To Your Site’s Uploads Directory

The “uploads” directory contains all the media that gets uploaded to your WordPress site.

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

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, anyone could upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your website.

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 an empty file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to consult a professional if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use Security Plugins

A number of great WordPress security plugins are available that specifically address most common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to vital areas of your site, protecting your site from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – complete security plugin for WordPress)

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

Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender scans you web site for security holes …

And then shows you how to 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 very secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WordPress software, plugins and WP themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

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

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by a security expert to all WordPress users following the large-scale brute force attacks by botnets 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 above article will help 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 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 articles and tutorials on WordPress security and tutorials about WordPress security plugins.

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