WordPress often is targeted by hackers, due to its global popularity.

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

These attacks were caused by networks of infected computers programmed to attack other vulnerable sites (botnets).

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

What Are 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 admin’s login username and password. This can be achieved with software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login possibilities in minutes.

If you’re using obvious user names and predictable passwords, your website could be an easy target for hacking attempts.

This is called a “brute force” login 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)

”Botnets” are networks of computers that have been infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, typically without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware that this is happening inside their device.

Botnets are often used to blast mass spam emails from the infected computers of unsuspecting users.

Below is a screenshot taken from an online security monitoring site 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” …

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

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

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

(WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS making it a frequent target for malicious attacks by hackers)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

No. In fact, there are lots of good reasons why you should choose WordPress if you are concerned about the security of your online presence.

To learn what makes WordPress a very secure web platform, see this article: Is WordPress Secure? What Every Website Owner Needs To Know

It’s important to understand that, in the case of April 2013 brute-force attack described above, no specific WordPress vulnerability was being exploited (the same script was also attacking sites built using other web platforms like Joomla).

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, 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)

Preventing Your WordPress Blog From Brute Force Attacks – Ten Security Points

You may think that the information in your website or blog has no significant value to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, all websites provide an opportunity to profit or benefit at your expense.

If hackers can find a way to access and take over your website or blog, your blog can then be employed to attack larger and more valued web sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of having your site hacked include being blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links advertising things like online meds, porn, etc. inserted into your content and meta data, malicious redirects to phishing sites or other websites, drive-by downloads (adding malware on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasty things.

The reality is that hackers are trying to break into your web site at this very moment. Whether they will hack into your site or not, will depend on how hard or easy you have made things for hackers to keep trying until they either can work out how to get access, or give up and go look for a more vulnerable target.

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

Does your website run on WordPress? If so visit a site like Hackertarget.com and run your site through their WordPress security check …

(Hackertarget – WP Security Check Source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the test will display a number of results and information about your website setup …

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

It should be obvious after using the above tool that if you can see all of this information about your WordPress website, then so can hackers.

(Screenshot image: Blog Defender)

Being able to see which 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 can be potentially useful information to hackers, as this can inform them about exploitable holes or weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your website runs on WordPress and you are not taking steps to toughen up your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your website, because these brute-force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations all the world!

Typically, whenever a website gets hacked, site owners can discover much to their dismay that they have been “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been modified or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Often, sites will be infected with malicious scripts without the owner even being aware of it.

To help avoid the heartache and aggravation of discovering that your web site has been hacked into, below are 10 simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to prevent your WordPress site from brute-force attacks.

Note: A few of the measures below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you have no web editing skills, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress technical provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Webhosting Service

Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them exactly what security measures have been put in place to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what they do to ensure that your files and data get regularly backed up.

Check that your hosting service provider regularly backs up your server files and that, if anything goes wrong, you can easily get back your files.

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

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WP maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress website fully backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Screenshot source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WordPress site fully backed up and up-to-date. WP site 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 someone 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 you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are many free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your site backups here: Back Up, Copy And Protect Your WP Site With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

the worldwide brute-force attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise website administrator panels by exploiting sites with “admin” as the user name.

For website security reasons, never install a WordPress site with the username admin. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is “admin”, then make sure you change it immediately.

For a simple step-by-step tutorial created especially for non-technical admin users on how to change your login username, go here: Changing Your Admin User Name In WordPress To Another User Name

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

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

Unless some measure is put into place to stop the brute force attack from happening (see further below for a couple of simple and effective ways to do this), the “bot” will just continue attacking your site until it eventually breaks into your admin area.

Weak passwords, therefore, are really easy targets for botnets. Make sure that you change your password combination to something containing at least 8 or 9 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, combined with a few “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

Roboform is a password software that lets you create secure passwords …

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

We have created a tutorial created especially for WordPress users that shows you how to change your WordPress password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Passwords In WordPress

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

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

(wp-config.php)

If a hacker breaks into your site, they will typically try to access your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that 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 accessible. 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 Website 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 Blog, Plugins & Themes Up-To-Date

Hackers search for vulnerabilities they can exploit in earlier WordPress versions, including outdated versions of WP themes and plugins.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor that lets you edit theme and plugin files from the dashboard.

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the WordPress admin menu)

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your site see and modify all of your theme template files, or create mayhem on your site.

If you want to prevent people from being able to access 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 – Prevent Access To The WordPress Uploads Folder

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

Normally, this folder is visible to all users online. All a person needs to do to view all of the contents stored in your site’s “uploads” directory is visit 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, someone could upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your site.

Protecting your directories will prevent online users from viewing 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 an empty file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to use a professional if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use WordPress Security Plugins

A number of great WordPress security plugins are available that specifically address most security issues faced by WordPress site 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 WordPress plugin that does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing issues that could lead to hackers accessing your site files and causing irreparable damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WP security software solution)

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

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

Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite

(Blog Defender Security Suite For WordPress Web Sites)

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

BlogDefender shows you where potential security holes in your WordPress installation are …

And lets you fix these quickly and easily …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like updating your WordPress software, WP plugins and themes, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site 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 websites.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by a web security expert to all WordPress users after the worldwide brute-force attacks 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, WordPress 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 keep your WordPress site protected from brute-force attacks. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please consult 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 via email whenever we publish new articles on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins.

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