When you are the most popular content management system in the world and the preferred online publishing platform for millions of businesses and loved by thousands of website developers and web designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will become an easy target for attacks from hackers wanting to score a “big win”.

In early 2013 a worldwide brute-force attack hit WordPress installations on almost every WP host server in existence around the world.

These attacks were caused by computer networks infected with viruses and programmed to attack other computers, also commonly known as “botnets”.

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)

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. This is done with software programs that can work through hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable user names and weak passwords that are easy to guess, your website can be easily hacked by repeated attempts to guess your site’s login details.

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.org)

A “Botnet” is a network of computers that have been infected with malicious scripts or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, typically without the computer owners’ knowledge.

Botnets are normally used used to send mass spam emails.

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

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

These were highly distributed and well organized botnet attacks. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several hosting companies in the initial attack alone, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users administration areas took place. The worldwide attack then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked each day.

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

(Being the world’s most popular content management system makes WordPress a target for attempted hacker attacks)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

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

To learn what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites, read this article: Is WordPress A Secure Website Platform?

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, 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 Prevent Your WordPress Website From Being Brute Force Attacked – Ten Security Checks

Every blog with a security vulnerability provides an opportunity to hackers. A vulnerable site offers hackers with a resource for denial of service attacks, spreading malware and engaging in information theft.

If a hacker can find a vulnerability that allows them to gain control of your website or blog, the website or blog can then be employed as part of a larger network of “bots” to target other highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of being hacked include being blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links promoting things like casinos, porn, etc. in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites or other websites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasty things.

The truth is that malicious bots are most likely searching for vulnerabilities and trying to break into your website at this very moment. Whether they will achieve this depends on how challenging you have made things for hackers to continue persisting until they either find how to get access, or are forced to give up and decide to look for a less protected target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – Website Security Scan Screenshot: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the scan returns a number of results and information about your WordPress installation …

(WordPress security check results. Product image: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image source: BlogDefender.com)

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

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you’re not preventive steps to bullet-proof your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some point, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites all the world!

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

To avoid the heartache and aggravation of discovering that your website or blog has been hacked into, we have listed below 10 simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to prevent your WordPress site from being attacked by brute force hackers.

Note: A few of the recommended steps listed below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you are not technical-minded, 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.

***

Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Host

Contact your webhosting service provider and ask them what measures are in place to protect your site from brute force attacks, and what is done to make sure that your server files get backed up.

Check that your webhosting service provider regularly backs up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily get your site back.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Full WordPress Backups And Keep Your Site Regularly Maintained

You should never rely just on your webhosting provider for site backups. Instead, learn how to manage your WordPress site or get this service done for you and maintain a habit of performing a complete WordPress site maintenance routine frequently (e.g. weekly, monthly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WP maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress installation frequently backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WordPress website fully backed up and up-to-date is. WP maintenance is not hard 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, get someone else 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 your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are a number of free and paid plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Duplicate And Protect Your WordPress Sites With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

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

For security purposes, never install a WordPress site with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is “admin”, then change this immediately.

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username here: Changing Your Admin Username In WordPress To Another Username

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

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

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

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, make very easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to something containing at least eight characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

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

(Roboform is a password tool that lets you easily create different strong login passwords)

For a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress admin password, go here: Changing Your WordPress Password

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

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

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your site, they will normally search for 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.

In order to protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent people finding 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 Blog Installation Files

Delete or rename your install.php, upgrade.php and readme.html files.

You can remove these files after installation. If you don’t want to remove these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Update Your WordPress Installation, Themes & Plugins

Hackers look for vulnerabilities in outdated versions of WordPress that can be exploited, including outdated versions of plugins and themes.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

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

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the dashboard menu)

This means that anyone logging into your site can view and change your WordPress theme templates, or create mayhem on your site.

To prevent people from accessing 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 – Secure Your WordPress Uploads Directory

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

Normally, this folder is visible to all users online. All a person needs to do to view the contents in your site’s “uploads” directory is navigate to your directory using their browser …

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any files stored in his folder have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, this could seriously threaten 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 a file with nothing in it named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to get professional help if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

Some great WordPress security plugins are available that will address common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing hackers from accessing your site, protecting your website from botnets, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

Many WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One 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 damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WordPress complete security software solution)

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 plugin you may want to consider using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite

(Blog Defender Security Product Suite)

Blog Defender is a suite of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus a WordPress security PDF/DOC file.

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 purchase a premium security plugin like SecureScanPro or BlogDefender, then use various free plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like updating your WordPress software, plugins and themes, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to attacks 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 one last reminder, below is the advice given by a website security expert to all WordPress users following the large-scale 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

***

As you can see, WordPress security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the above information will help keep your WordPress site protected from brute force attacks. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please consult a professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, remember subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified whenever we publish new tutorials on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins.

***

***