WordPress is frequently the target of malicious attempts by hackers.

In early 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 computers with security vulnerabilities).

How To Protect Your WordPress Site From A Brute-Force Attack

Brute Force Attacks – Definition

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. This can be done using scripts and tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using obvious usernames and passwords, your website could be easily hacked by a malicious script’s 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)

A “Botnet” is a network of computers that have been infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware that this is happening.

Botnets are regularly used to blast out mass spam emails.

The screenshot below was taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009 called “Zeus” …

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

These were well organized and highly distributed attacks on WordPress sites. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of hosting companies just in the initial attack, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress site admin areas took place. The attack continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked every day.

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

(WordPress is often the target of mass attacks by hackers)

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

No. In fact, there are many great reasons why you should choose WordPress if you are concerned about the security of your online business.

To understand why WordPress is a secure platform for websites, read this article: Is WordPress Secure? What Every Website Owner Needs To Know

It’s important to note that, in the case of April 2013 large-scale brute force botnet attack described above, there was actually no WordPress vulnerability being exploited (the same script was also targeting sites built using other platforms like Joomla).

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, said this about the botnet 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 Site From Brute-Force Attacks – 10 Security Checks

Every website with a vulnerability presents an opportunity to hackers. Every website has some value to hackers. Corporate sites, personal blogs, government sites … even sites owned by online security experts can and have been targeted.

If a malicious user can hack and gain stealth control of your website, that web site can then be employed as a “bot” in a planned cyberattack against other valued web sites.

Additional undesirable results of having your site hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by Google, having spammy links promoting things like gambling, discounted fashion, etc. inserted into your content and meta data, malicious redirects to phishing sites or other websites, data exfiltration (stealing information or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasties.

The harsh reality is that brute-force software bots are trying to break into your website as you are reading this page right now. Whether they can break in successfully or not, depends on how challenging you will make things for hackers to continue trying until they work out a way to get access, or are forced to give up and go look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(WP Security Check Product image: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will yield various results and information about your site setup …

(Hackertarget – WordPress security check results. Screenshot image: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot 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 in your site are all useful information to hackers, as this informs them about any potential security vulnerabilities, especially where the owners haven’t updated their software versions.

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you’re not proactive steps to harden 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 targeting WordPress installations all the world!

When a website or blog gets compromised, site owners can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or even that their content has been completely wiped out. Typically, sites will be infected with malicious scripts without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache that comes with discovering that your website has been hacked into, we have listed below 10 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 recommended measures below require 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 file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for assistance.

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

Get in touch with your web host and ask them what security measures they have put in place to protect your site from brute-force attacks, and what is done to make sure that your server files are being regularly backed up.

Check that your hosting provider backs up your sites and that, if anything happens, you can quickly and easily get back your files.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Site Frequently Updated

Never rely only on your host for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or get this done for you and maintain a habit of religiously performing a full WordPress site maintenance routine on a frequent basis (e.g. daily, weekly, fortnightly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP installation completely 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 or blog regularly backed up and up-to-date is. WordPress maintenance is not hard or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website. If you do not want to learn how to do WordPress site maintenance yourself, pay someone to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your site is the second most important thing you must do after making sure that you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are a number of plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Back Up, Duplicate & Protect Your WP Websites And Blogs With Backup Creator Plugin For WP

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

the worldwide brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise site administrator panels by exploiting WP installations that used “admin” as their username.

For reasons of website security, avoid installing a WordPress site with the username admin. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s username is admin, change this immediately.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to change your login username, go here: How To Change Your WordPress User Name From Admin To A More Secure Username

Security Measure #4 – Change Your Password

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

Unless you put some measure in place to stop the brute-force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just persist in attacking your site until it eventually gets access.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, make very easy targets for botnets. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string that is at least 8 characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and “special” characters (e.g. ^, $, @, etc).

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

(You can use a password program like Roboform to help you generate really secure passwords)

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress admin password, go here: What To Do If You Need To Change Your 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 hackers break into your WordPress website, they will typically try to access the wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your WordPress database details, 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.

To protect your WordPress site from being attacked and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent your wp-config.php file from being easily 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 Blog Installation Files

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

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

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

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor feature that lets the site administrator edit plugin and theme files from the dashboard area.

In WordPress, you can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor in your admin menu …

(The WordPress theme editor is accessible via the dashboard menu)

This allows anyone accessing your site’s admin to view and edit your WordPress theme files, and create havoc on your site.

If you want to prevent 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 – Secure The WordPress Uploads Folder

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

Normally, this folder is visible to online users. All someone has to do to view all of the contents in your “uploads” directory is visit the directory using their browser …

(WordPress has an uploads folder where all of your media files are stored)

If any files stored in his folder have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, anyone can upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your site.

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, 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 seek professional help if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

Some great WordPress security plugins are available that will address many common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your site from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

Most WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One WordPress plugin that seems to do a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your site files and causing irreparable damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – complete security software for WordPress)

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

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

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender scans you WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities …

And lets you quickly fix these …

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

WordPress is a very secure platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WP core files, plugins and themes are kept up-to-date, 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, web security 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 web security to all WordPress users after the global 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, website security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in 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 professional WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

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

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