Being the world’s most used content management system makes WordPress a frequent target for hackers.

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

These attacks were caused by computer networks infected with malware and programmed to attack other installations, 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 WordPress sites 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 possible login combinations in minutes.

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your website can be easily hacked by persistent attempts to work out your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” attack.

Botnets – What Are They?

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 or scripts, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails from 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 infecting computer networks all around the world since 2009. Screenshot image: SecureList.com)

The botnet attacks are well organized and highly distributed. 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 user administration areas occurred. The worldwide brute force attacks then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress sites and blogs being hacked each day.

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

(WordPress is the world’s most used CMS making it a frequent target for hacking)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

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

To understand why WordPress is a secure web platform, see this article: Is WordPress Secure?

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, 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 Protect Your WordPress Website From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Points

You may think that your website offers little to no value to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website is an opportunity to profit or benefit at your expense.

If hackers can exploit a vulnerability, that site can then be employed to target more valued sites.

Additional undesirable effects of being hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links promoting things like viagra, discounted fashion, 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 truth is that brute-force software bots are searching for vulnerabilities and trying to hack into your website as you are reading these very words. Whether they will successfully get into your site will depend on how difficult you will make it for them to continue trying until they can discover how to break in, or give up and go look for an easier target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Check Source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the test will yield a number of results and details about your website …

(WP security check results. Image source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot: BlogDefender website)

The ability 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 valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any security vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you are not proactive steps to toughen up your site, then it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point, someone will attempt to hack your installation, because these attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations around the world!

When a site gets broken into, webmasters will 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 be infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner even being aware that a security breach has happened.

To avoid the heartache and aggravation that comes with having your web site being hacked into, below are 10 essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being attacked by brute-force hackers.

Note: Some of the recommended measures 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 WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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

Contact your hosting provider and ask them exactly what security systems are in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to ensure that your WordPress sites are being regularly backed up.

Check that your host regularly backs up your sites and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily get your site back.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Website Regularly Maintained

Never rely only on your web host for 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 complete WordPress site maintenance routine on a regular basis (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP website completely 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 WP web site frequently backed up and updated is. WP 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 do not want to learn how to do WP site maintenance yourself, pay a professional to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your website is the second most important thing you must do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are a number of free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your site backups here: Back Up, Clone & Protect Your WP Web Site With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The large scale brute-force attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise site administrator panels and gain access to the site by exploiting sites using “admin” as the username.

For reasons of website security, don’t set up 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 admin users on how to change your admin username, go here: How To Change Your Admin Username In WordPress To Another User Name

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

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

Unless you put some measure in place to prevent the brute-force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of 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 brute force attacks. Make sure that you change your password to something containing at least eight or nine characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, combined with a few “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

You can use a password management tool like Roboform to create difficult passwords …

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

For a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your password, go here: How To Change Your Password

Security Measure #5 – Secure Your WP Config File

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

(WP Config file)

If hackers break into your website, they will normally try to access the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your WordPress 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.

To protect your WordPress site from being attacked and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent people from being able to easily find 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

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

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 Installation, Themes And Plugins Up-To-Date

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The WordPress Theme Editor

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

You can access your WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor from your admin menu …

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

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your site view and edit your WP theme templates, and 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 editing your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Protect Your Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this could seriously threaten the security of your website.

Protecting your directories will prevent online users 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 blank file called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to use a professional if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

There are several security plugins for WordPress available that will address many common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your site from malicious exploits, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

Many WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One security plugin that does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing potential 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 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 WordPress Security Plugin

(Blog Defender Security Suite For WordPress)

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

BlogDefender shows you where potential security weaknesses in your website are …

And lets you fix these quickly …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like making sure that your WP software, WP 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.

No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security 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 web security to all WordPress users after the worldwide brute-force attacks by botnets 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 of the utmost importance 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 consult a professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, do yourself a favor and subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified whenever we publish new articles on WordPress security and tutorials about new security plugins and solutions.

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