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

In early 2013 a worldwide brute-force attack began hitting WordPress installations on virtually every WP hosting server in existence.

These attacks were caused by botnets (computers infected with malware and programmed to attack other computers 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 methods hackers use to try and break into WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. This can be done with software tools that can guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your site can be easily hacked by persistent 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)

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

Botnets are often used to send out mass spam emails from the infected computers of unsuspecting users.

The screenshot below was taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009 …

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

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

News of the April 2013 brute-force attack was widely reported in all the major webhosting companies, as well as the leading technology media publications, such as Forbes, TechNews Daily, Tech Crunch, BBC News, PC Magazine, and even on the official US Department of Homeland Security website …

(WordPress powers millions of sites around the world, making it a target for attempted attacks by hackers)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

No. In fact, there are lots of great reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about website security.

To understand why WordPress is a secure platform for websites, read this article: Why WordPress Is A Secure Platform For Websites –

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, made this comment 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 Prevent Your WordPress Blog From Being Brute Force Attacked – Ten Security Checks

You may think that your website has no value to hackers, but the reality is that every website has value to a malicious user.

If a hacker can find a web software weakness that allows them to access and control your blog, the website or blog can then be used as a “bot” to attack larger and more valued websites.

Additional undesirable results of having your website hacked include being blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links promoting things like viagra, porn, etc. in your content and page title and descriptions, malicious redirects to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing information or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasties.

The harsh reality is that malicious bots are most likely scouring for security weaknesses and trying to hack into your web site while you are reading this. Whether they can hack in successfully depends on how difficult or easy you can make things for hackers to continue persisting until they either can find a way to break in, or are forced to decide to look for an easier target.

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

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

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

You will see that the scan returns various results and information about your WordPress installation …

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

It should be obvious after using this tool that if you are able to freely access all of this information about your blog, so can hackers.

(Screenshot: BlogDefender site)

The ability 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 useful information to hackers, as this informs them about potential security weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your site or blog runs on WordPress and you are not preventive steps to harden your site, we can practically guarantee that, at some point in time, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these brute-force attacks are systematically targeting WordPress installations all the world!

When a website or blog is compromised, webmasters can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been modified or even entirely wiped out. Typically, sites will become infected with malicious software or viruses without the owner even being aware that this has occurred.

To help avoid the heartache and frustration of having your site being hacked into, below are 10 simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to prevent your WordPress site from being brute-force attacked.

Note: A few of the recommended steps listed below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress or server files. If you are not technical, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Hosting Provider

Contact your webhosting service and ask them what systems they offer to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to make sure that your files and data get regularly backed up.

It is important to check that your webhosting provider backs up your sites and that, if anything goes wrong, you can quickly and easily get your files back.

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

Never rely only on your web host for your site backups. Instead, learn how to manage your WordPress site or get this done for you and develop a habit of religiously performing a full site maintenance routine frequently (e.g. weekly, monthly, etc …)

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WP website or blog regularly backed up and updated is. 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 WP site maintenance yourself, pay someone to do it but make sure this 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 many plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Clone And Protect Your WP Websites With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The brute force attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise website administrator panels by exploiting WordPress installations that used “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 it immediately.

For a tutorial on how to change your login username, go here: Changing Your Admin Username In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Make Sure Your Password Is Secure

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually and persistently hits a login or password field with different strings of characters in an attempt to guess the right login combination that will give them entry to your site.

Unless you put some measure in place to stop the brute-force attack (see further below for a couple of effective ways to do this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually breaks into your admin area.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, make very easy targets for hackers. Make sure that you change your password to something that contains at least 8 or 9 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. %, $, &, etc).

You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to help you generate secure passwords …

(Roboform is a password management tool that lets you create different secure passwords)

We have created a tutorial for non-technical admin users that shows you how to change your password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Passwords

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

The wp-config.php file contains information about your blog’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 is the file that contains important information about your site’s database, security keys, etc. Getting access to this information would allow a hacker 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, you must 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 – Rename Or Delete Unnecessary Installation Files

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

These files are not required after installation. If you don’t want to remove these files, just rename them.

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

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

Ensure that all of your installation files, themes, plugins, etc. are always up to date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

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

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

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

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your site’s admin area see and make changes to all of your WordPress theme files, or cause havoc on your site.

To prevent people from accessing 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 The WordPress Uploads Directory

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

By default, this folder is visible to online users. All a person needs to do to view all of the contents in your site’s “uploads” folder is visit your directory using a web browser …

(WordPress has an uploads folder where media content is stored)

If any directories in your website have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this can 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, uploading 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 ask help from someone who knows what they are doing if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use WordPress Security Plugins

A number of security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address most security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your website from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – WordPress security software)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of fixing most of the security areas that WordPress users need to address.

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

Blog Defender Security Plugin

(Blog Defender)

Blog Defender 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 weaknesses in your web site 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 WordPress plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like making sure that your WP core files, plugins and themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your sites is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.

As one last reminder of the importance of keeping your websites protected, 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, this information will help prevent brute-force attacks on your WordPress site. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please seek help from a 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 be notified when we publish new articles on WordPress security and tutorials about WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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