When you are the leading content management system in the world and the online publishing platform of choice for millions of websites and loved by thousands of website developers and web designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will become an obvious target for attacks from hackers.

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

These attacks were caused by networks of infected computers programmed to attack other vulnerable sites, also commonly known as “botnets”.

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’s administration login username and password. To achieve this, hackers use software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login combinations in minutes.

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your site can be an easy target for hackers.

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

Botnets

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 computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious code or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

Botnets are normally used used to blast mass spam emails from computers of unsuspecting users.

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

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

These botnet attacks were well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several webhosting companies just in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress user admin areas. The attack then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked each day.

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

(WordPress is often the target of large-scale malicious attacks by hackers)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

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

To understand what makes WordPress a very secure web platform, read this article: How Secure Is WordPress?

It’s important to note that, in the case of the worldwide brute force botnet attack described above, was no specific vulnerability in WordPress being exploited (the same script was also attacking sites built using other CMS applications 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 Website From Brute Force Attacks – 10 Security Checks

You may think that the information in your website provides little to no value to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website is an opportunity to gain some benefit at your expense.

If a hacker can discover a vulnerability in your security setup, that web site can then be employed as a “bot” to attack other highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of having your website hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links promoting things like viagra, porn, etc. inserted into your content and page title and descriptions, malicious redirects to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious scripts on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasties.

The harsh reality is that malicious bots are most likely trying to hack into your blog right now. Whether they will be successful or not, depends on how hard you will make things for them to keep persisting until they discover how to get access, or are forced to give up and go look for an easier 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 …

(Hackertarget – Website Security Scan Screenshot: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the check returns various results and information about your website setup …

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

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

(Screenshot source: Blog Defender)

Being able 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 can all be potentially valuable information to hackers, as these can inform them about any exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially where the owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you’re not proactive steps to bolster the security of your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some time in the near future, someone will attempt to hack your installation, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

When a website or blog gets hacked, blog 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. Typically, compromised sites will become infected with malicious scripts without the owner even being aware of it.

To help avoid the heartache (and potential financial loss) of discovering that your website or blog has been hacked into, below are ten simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to prevent your WordPress site from brute-force botnet attacks.

Note: Some of the steps listed 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 file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for help.

***

Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Webhosting Company

Get in touch with your host and ask them what precautions they have put in place to help prevent your site from brute force attacks, and what they do to ensure that your server files are regularly being backed up.

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

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Site Regularly Up-To-Date

Never rely only on your webhosting service provider for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain your WordPress site or get this done for you and develop a habit of performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine frequently (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress installation regularly 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 regularly 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 or blog. If you don’t want to learn how to do WP 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 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 Protect Your WordPress Web Sites With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise website administrator panels and gain access to sites by exploiting installations with “admin” as their user name.

For reasons of website security, don’t set up sites with the username admin. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s user name is admin, then make sure you change it immediately.

We have created a detailed tutorial on how to change your admin username here: How To Change Your WordPress User Name From Admin To A More Secure User Name

Security Measure #4 – Change Your Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually and persistently tries to guess the right password and username characters that will unlock your site.

Unless some measure is put into place to block 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 really easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to something containing at least 8 or 9 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. %, $, @, etc).

Roboform is a password management tool that lets you easily generate secure login passwords …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to generate hard-to-guess passwords)

We have created a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your admin password here: Changing WordPress Passwords

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

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

(WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your website, they will normally look for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database information, 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 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 – 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 – Keep Your WordPress Files, Themes & Plugins Up-To-Date

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor using the admin menu)

This allows anyone accessing your blog to view and edit your theme template files, and cause havoc on your site.

To prevent unauthorized 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 – Remove Access To Your Site’s Uploads Folder

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

By default, this folder is visible to all users online. All someone has to do to see the contents in your “uploads” directory is navigate to your directory using their web browser …

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, this can become a serious threat to the security of your site.

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, 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 ask for assistance from someone with experience if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Install WordPress Security Plugins

There are several WordPress security plugins available that specifically address most security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing hackers from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your files from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

Many WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One plugin that does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and damaging 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 issues that WordPress users need to address.

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

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender Security Product Suite)

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

BlogDefender scans you WordPress installation for potential 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, then use various free plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WordPress installation, plugins and WP themes are kept updated to their latest versions, 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 website is something you simply cannot ignore.

As one last reminder of the importance of website security, below is the advice given by an expert on website security 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, website security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has shown you what to do to prevent brute-force attacks on your WordPress site. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please seek help from a professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to be notified when we publish new information on WordPress security and tutorials about WordPress security plugins and solutions.

***

***