Being the world’s most popular content management system makes WordPress a target for malicious attacks by hackers.

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

These attacks were caused by botnets (networks of infected computers programmed to attack other computers with security vulnerabilities).

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

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your website could be an easy target for hackers.

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 private computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious code, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners even being aware that this is going on in their machine.

Botnets are typically 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” …

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

The botnet attacks are highly distributed and well organized. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several hosting companies just in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress site admin areas. The worldwide brute-force attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked each day.

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

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

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

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

We explain why WordPress is a secure web platform in this article: How Secure Is WordPress?

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

Preventing Your WordPress Blog From Being Brute Force Attacked – 10 Security Points

You may think that your site has nothing to offer to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website provides an opportunity to benefit at your expense.

If a malicious user can find a flaw in your security, your site can then be employed as part of a larger network of “bots” to target other valuable web sites.

Additional undesirable effects of having your site hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links promoting things like online meds, cheap offers on brand names, etc. in your content and meta data, redirecting visitors to phishing sites or other websites, data exfiltration (stealing customer details or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and lots of other nasty things.

The harsh reality is that hackers are scouring for security exploits and trying to hack into your web site right now. Whether they will be successful will depend on how challenging you will make it for hackers to keep trying until they either can discover how to break in, or decide to look for a less secure target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Scan Product image: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

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

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

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

(Image source: BlogDefender.com)

The ability to see what version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories can be potentially useful information to hackers, as this informs them about potentially exploitable vulnerabilities, especially where site owners haven’t updated their software versions.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you are not preventive steps to toughen up your site, we can practically guarantee that, at some time in the near future, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites all the world!

Typically, whenever a website or blog is compromised, blog owners can discover much to their dismay that they have been “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been altered or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most compromised sites will be infected with malicious software without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache and aggravation of having your website being hacked into, below are ten simple, yet essential and effective security measures that will help to prevent your WordPress site from brute-force attacks.

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

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

Contact your webhosting company and ask them what measures they offer to help prevent your site from botnet attacks, and what they are doing to ensure that your files and data get backed up.

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

Security Measure #2 – Perform Full WordPress Backups And Keep Your Site Regularly Updated

You should never rely only on your hosting provider for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain your WordPress site or pay someone to get this done for you and develop a habit of religiously performing a full site maintenance routine on a frequent basis (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, 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 themes, plugins and software components are up-to-date,
• etc …

A proper WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress installation completely backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WP website or blog completely backed up and updated. 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 maintenance yourself, pay a professional to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your site is the next 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 plugins you can use. You can read about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Backup, Copy And Protect Your WordPress Sites With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

The brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise website administrator panels and gain access to sites by exploiting sites with “admin” as their username.

For website security reasons, don’t set up sites with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is admin, change it immediately.

We have created a simple step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your admin username here: How To Change Your WordPress Username From Admin To Another Username

Security Measure #4 – Avoid Weak Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script continually hits a login or password field with different strings of characters trying to guess the right combination that will give them access to your site.

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

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, make very easy targets for hackers. Make sure that you change your password to a string containing at least eight characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

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

(Roboform is a password program that lets you easily generate different strong login passwords)

For a detailed tutorial created especially for non-technical WP admin users that shows you how to change your WordPress password, go here: How To Reset Your Password

Security Measure #5 – Prevent The wp-config.php File From Being Easily Found

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

(wp-config.php file)

If a hacker breaks into your WordPress site, they will normally look for the wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your 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 attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, you must prevent people from being able to easily get to 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 Blog Installation Files

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

These files are not required after installation. If you don’t want to delete these files, just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Update Your WordPress Blog, Themes & Plugins To Their Latest Version

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

Ensure that all of your WordPress 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 allows administrators to edit plugin and theme code from the dashboard.

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the WP dashboard menu)

The WordPress theme editor lets anyone accessing your blog’s admin view and change your WordPress theme template files, or cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent unauthorized people from being able to access the WordPress Theme editor, you will need to disable it. This can be done by editing your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Prevent Access To Your WordPress Uploads Directory

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

By default, this folder is visible to all users online. All someone has to do to view all of the contents in your site’s “uploads” folder 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 weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, this can threaten the security of your website.

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 named “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

There are several WordPress security plugins available that will address most common security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your website from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – WordPress complete security plugin)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of addressing most of the security issues that WordPress users need to address.

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

Blog Defender Security Product Suite

(Blog Defender WordPress Security Solution)

Blog Defender 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 web site are …

And then shows you how to quickly fix these …

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

WordPress is a very secure platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like making sure that your WP core files, WP plugins and WP themes are kept updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

No matter what type 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 website security.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by a website security expert to all WordPress users following the large-scale 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 above article has shown you what to do to 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 be notified when we publish new information on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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