Being the world’s most used CMS makes WordPress a frequent target for attempted hacker attacks.

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

These attacks were caused by infected computer networks programmed to attack other vulnerable 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 will attempt to break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. This can be done with scripts and software that can guess hundreds of possible login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using weak usernames and passwords, your website can be an easy target for hackers.

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/botnet)

”Botnets” are networks of computers that have been infected with malicious scripts or code, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners even being aware that this is taking place.

Botnets are typically used to blast out mass spam emails from the infected computers of compromised user accounts.

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 globe since 2009 …

(The Zeus botnet has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009. Screenshot: SecureList.com)

These botnet attacks on WordPress are well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several hosting companies just in the initial attack, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress user administration areas occurred. The attack continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked per day.

Coverage of the mass brute force botnet attack was reported by all the major webhosting companiesand 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 used content management system makes WordPress an obvious target for hacking)

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

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

To understand what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites, see this article: Why WordPress Is A Secure Platform For Websites –

It’s important to understand that, in the case of the mass 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, 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)

How To Protect Your WordPress Website From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Measures

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

If a malicious user can exploit a way to control your site, your web site can then be employed as a “bot” in a planned cyber-attack against more valuable websites.

Additional undesirable results of having your website hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links promoting things like online meds, discounted fashion, etc. inserted in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites and other websites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasties.

The reality is that hackers are probably searching for weaknesses and trying to break into your website or blog while you are reading this right now. Whether they can get into your site or not, depends on how difficult you have made things for hackers and botnets to keep trying until they can discover how to get access, or are forced to decide to look for an easier target.

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

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

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

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

(website security scan results. Product image source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image source: BlogDefender.com)

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 are all useful information to hackers, as this informs them about exploitable security weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you are not precautionary steps to bullet-proof your site, then it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your site, because these attacks are systematically targeting WordPress installations around the world!

When a website or blog is broken into, site owners will find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been interfered with or even entirely wiped out. Typically, sites will become infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner even being aware that this has happened.

To avoid the heartache and frustration that comes with 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 measures below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you are not technical-minded, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Web Host

Get in touch with your webhosting provider and ask them exactly what systems have been put in place to help prevent your site from brute-force attacks, and what they are doing to ensure that your server files get regularly backed up.

Make sure that your web host backs up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can quickly and easily get your files and data back.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Regular WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Regularly Updated

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

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress website regularly backed up and up-to-date is. WordPress site 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 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 must do after making sure that your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Duplicate And Protect Your WP 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 attempting to compromise website admin panels by exploiting WordPress installations using “admin” as the username.

For website security purposes, avoid setting up WordPress sites with the username admin. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s username is admin, change it immediately.

For a simple tutorial created especially for non-technical admin users on how to change your admin username, go here: How To Change Your Admin Username In WordPress To A More Secure User Name

Security Measure #4 – Use A Strong Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script persistently tries to guess the right combination of password and username characters that will give the hacker entry to your site.

Unless some measure is put into 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 continue to attack your site until it eventually gets access.

Weak passwords, therefore, make really easy targets for botnets. Make sure that you change your password combination to something containing at least 8 characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

If you have trouble coming up with strong passwords or you are reluctant to set up different passwords for all your online logins, then use a password management program like Roboform …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to help you generate unguessable passwords)

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to change your admin password, go here: Changing WordPress Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Secure Your WP Config 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 hackers break into your site, they will search for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database details, 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.

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 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 Website Installation Files

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

These files are completely unnecessary after installation and can be deleted. If you don’t want to remove these files, just rename them.

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

Hackers look for vulnerabilities in outdated versions of WordPress that they can exploit, including out-of-date versions of WP plugins and themes.

Make sure to always keep all of your files, themes, plugins, etc. up-to-date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable The Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor feature that allows the site administrator to edit theme and plugin files inside 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 admin menu)

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your site view and make changes to your theme templates, or create havoc on your site.

If you want to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the 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 Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

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

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, this can seriously threaten 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 an empty file called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to get professional help if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

A number of great security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address common security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your site from malicious software, preventing unauthorized file uploads, 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 files and causing irreparable damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – total security plugin for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and addresses most of the security areas that WordPress users need to address.

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

Blog Defender Security Suite

(Blog Defender Security Product Suite)

This product 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 holes in your website are …

And lets you quickly and easily fix these …

If you don’t want to buy a 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 essential maintenance tasks like keeping your WP core files, WP plugins and WP themes updated to their latest versions, 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, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your site.

As one last reminder of the importance of website security, below is the advice given by an expert on web security to all WordPress users after the worldwide brute force attacks 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, WordPress security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, this article 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 professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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

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