Being the world’s most popular CMS makes WordPress a frequent target for hacking attempts.

In April 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to worldwide brute force attacks.

These attacks were caused by botnets (computer networks infected with malware and programmed to attack other vulnerable sites).

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

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 ways hackers try to break into a WordPress site. One of these is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. This can be achieved using scripts and tools that can work through hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable user names and weak passwords that are easy to guess, your website could be easily hacked by the script’s persistent attempts to work out your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” attack.

Botnet Definition

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.org)

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

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails.

The screenshot below was 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 world since 2009 …

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

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

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

(Being the world’s most used CMS makes WordPress an obvious target for hacking attempts)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

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

To understand why WordPress is a secure web platform, read this article: Are Open Source CMS Platforms Like WordPress Secure?

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

Every blog with a security vulnerability offers value to hackers. All websites have value to hackers. Large, medium and small business sites, personal blogs, government sites … even websites owned by web security experts can and have been targeted.

If hackers can exploit a way to take over your website or blog, the website or blog can then be used as part of a larger network of “bots” to target larger and more highly-valued web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of having your website hacked include being blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links promoting things like gambling, porn, etc. in your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious software on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasties.

The reality is that brute-force software bots are trying to hack into your blog right now. Whether they will break in successfully or not, will depend on how hard or easy you will make things for hackers to continue trying until they can either work out a way to break in, or decide to look for a less secure 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 site through their WordPress security check …

(WordPress Security Check Image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will yield various results and details about your WordPress site …

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

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

(Screenshot 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 are all valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about exploitable security weaknesses, especially where the owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your site or blog runs on WordPress and you are not taking appropriate steps to harden your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your site, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Whenever a website is compromised, webmasters can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their content has been interfered with or even entirely wiped out. Often, sites will become infected with malicious software or viruses without the owner even being aware that this has taken place.

To help avoid the heartache of having your website or blog being hacked into, we have listed below ten simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being attacked by brute force botnets.

Note: A few of the measures shown below require some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and server files. If you have no web coding skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress technical provider for assistance.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Host

Contact your webhosting service and ask them exactly what systems have been put in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what they do to ensure that your files and data get backed up.

Make sure that your webhosting provider regularly backs up your server files and that, if anything goes wrong, you can quickly and easily get your site back.

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

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

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress website or blog regularly backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WordPress website or blog completely backed up and up-to-date 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 WordPress 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 are still breathing!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are many plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Back Up, Duplicate And Keep Your WordPress Web Site Protected With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

The large scale brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly attempting to compromise site administrator panels and gain access to the site by exploiting WP installations that used “admin” as their user name.

For website security reasons, never set up WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is “admin”, change this immediately.

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username here: Changing Your WordPress Admin Username To A Different User Name

Security Measure #4 – Avoid Weak Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually tries to guess the right username and password character string that will give them access to your website.

Unless you put some measure in place to block the brute-force attack (see further below for a couple of simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just persist in attacking your site until it eventually breaks into your admin area.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, are really easy targets for hackers. Make sure that you change your password combination to something that is at least eight characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

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

(Roboform is a password software that lets you easily generate secure passwords)

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial for non-technical WP admin users that shows you how to change your WordPress password here: What To Do If You Need To Change Passwords In WordPress

Security Measure #5 – Protect 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 WordPress website, they will normally try to access your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your WordPress database information, 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.

To protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, you must prevent people from accessing 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 WP Installation Files

Delete or rename 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 – Keep Your WordPress Software, Plugins & Themes Up-To-Date

Hackers look for vulnerabilities in outdated versions of WordPress that can be exploited, including outdated versions of WordPress plugins and themes.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor that allows you to edit theme and plugin code inside the dashboard area.

In WordPress, you can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor from the main menu …

(The WordPress theme editor can be accessed using the dashboard menu)

This allows anyone accessing your blog’s admin to see and make changes to all of your theme files, and cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent 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 – Protect The WordPress Uploads Directory

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

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

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

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

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 consult a professional if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use WordPress Security Plugins

Some great security plugins for WordPress are available that will address common security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your website from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, 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 website files and damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – security plugin for WordPress)

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

Another great plugin you may want to look at using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender shows you where potential security weaknesses in your WordPress site are …

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

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

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like making sure that your WordPress core files, plugins and WP themes are kept updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to malicious by hackers and bots.

No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your website or blog.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by a security expert 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, the above information has provided you with the initial guidelines and help you need 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 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 information on WordPress security and reviews of WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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