When you are the leading CMS platform in the world and the preferred online publishing platform used by millions of websites and loved by thousands of website developers and website designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will become an obvious target for attacks by hackers wanting to score a “big win”.

In 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to a global-scale brute-force attack.

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

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)

There are many methods hackers use to try and break into WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This can be done using scripts and software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using obvious usernames and passwords, your site can be easily hacked by persistent attempts to guess your site’s login details.

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

Botnet – What Is This?

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)

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

Botnets are typically 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” …

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

These were well organized and highly distributed attacks. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several webhosting companies in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users administration areas. The large-scale attack then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked every day.

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

(Being the world’s most used CMS makes WordPress a target for hacking attacks)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

No. In fact, there are many very good reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your online presence.

To learn what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites, see this article: Are Open Source CMS Platforms Like WordPress Secure?

It’s important to understand that, in the case of April 2013 worldwide brute-force botnet 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, the co-founder of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, 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)

Preventing Your WordPress Website From Being Brute-Force Attacked – Ten Security Measures

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

If a malicious user can find a way to take over your website, the website or blog can then be used as a “bot” to attack other valuable websites.

Additional undesirable consequences of being hacked include being blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links advertising things like gambling, porn, etc. in your content and meta data, malicious redirects to phishing sites or other websites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasties.

The reality is that brute-force software bots are very likely trying to hack into your website as you are reading this right now. Whether they will hack into your site successfully depends on how hard or easy you can make things for them to continue trying until they can work out how to break in, or are forced to give up and go look for a less protected target.

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

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

(WordPress Security Check Screenshot source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the scan will yield various results and information about your WordPress setup …

(website security check results. Screenshot: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image: BlogDefender site)

Being able 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 can be potentially valuable information to hackers, as this can inform them about potential security vulnerabilities, especially where site owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you are not proactive steps to toughen up 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 hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Whenever a site gets compromised, site 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 entirely wiped out. Typically, sites will become infected with malicious software or viruses without the owner even being aware that a security breach has happened.

To avoid the heartache that comes with having your website being hacked into, we have listed below ten simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from being attacked by brute force hackers.

Note: A few of the steps shown below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you lack these technical skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Webhosting Provider

Get in touch with your webhosting service and ask them exactly what measures are in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what they are doing to ensure that your files and data are regularly being backed up.

Make sure that your hosting service regularly backs up your server files and that, if anything happens, you can easily get your site back.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Regular WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Or Blog Frequently Updated

Never rely on your hosting service provider for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or pay someone to get this service done for you and maintain a habit of religiously performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine on a regular basis (e.g. weekly, monthly, etc …)

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

• All unnecessary files and data are deleted,
• All WordPress 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 maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress website fully backed up and updated is. WordPress maintenance is not hard to do or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website or blog. If you don’t want to learn how to do WordPress 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 your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are a number of free and paid plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Copy & Protect Your WordPress Website With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

the worldwide brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise site administrator panels by exploiting sites with “admin” as their username.

For website security purposes, avoid installing WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your blog’s username is “admin”, then change this immediately.

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial created especially for non-technical WP admin users that shows you how to change your login username, go here: Changing Your WP Admin User Name To Another Username

Security Measure #4 – Avoid Weak Passwords

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

Unless some measure is put into place to stop the brute force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually “cracks” the code.

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

Roboform is a password software you can use to help you generate really secure passwords …

(Roboform is a password management tool you can use to create secure passwords)

For a tutorial that shows you how to change your login password, go here: How To Reset Your WordPress Password

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

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

(wp-config.php)

If a hacker breaks into your site, they will search 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 someone 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 your wp-config.php file from being accessed. 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 Site Installation Files

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

These files can be removed after installation. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

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

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor feature that allows you to edit theme and plugin code from the dashboard.

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

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

This allows anyone accessing your blog to see and edit all of your WordPress theme templates, or create mayhem on your site.

If you want 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 – Prevent Access To Your Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

(WordPress has an uploads directory where your media files are stored)

If any directories in your website have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, someone could upload unauthorized file types to 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 called “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 unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Install Security Plugins

A number of great security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address most security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your website from brute-force attacks, 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 issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – security software solution for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of addressing 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 Product Suite

(Blog Defender Security Suite For WordPress)

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

BlogDefender scans you WordPress site for security vulnerabilities …

And then shows you how to fix these quickly and easily …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like keeping your WP software, WP plugins and themes updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to malicious by hackers and bots.

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 sites is something you cannot ignore.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by a security expert to all WordPress users after 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, WordPress security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, this article has shown you what to do 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 WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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

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