When you are the leading CMS platform in the world and the preferred online publishing platform used by millions of websites and loved by thousands of website developers and website designers, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, WordPress will come under attack by hackers wanting to score a “big win”.

In 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to a global-scale brute force attack.

These attacks were caused by computers infected with malware and programmed to attack other computers (called “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 ways hackers try to break into WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. To achieve this, hackers use scripts and tools that can guess hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re not using strong usernames or unguessable passwords, your site can be an easy target for hacking attempts.

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.org)

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

Botnets are normally used used to blast mass spam emails.

The screenshot below was taken from an internet 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. Image source: SecureList.com)

These were well organized and highly distributed botnet attacks on WordPress. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of hosting companies in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress user admin areas. The brute-force attacks then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked every day.

News of this mass brute-force botnet attack was reported by all of the major webhosting companies, as well as the leading technology 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 is often the target of attacks by hackers)

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

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

We explain what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites in this article: How Secure Is WordPress?

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, 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)

How To Prevent Your WordPress Site From Being Brute Force Attacked – 10 Security Measures

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

If a malicious user can access and compromise the control of your web site, the blog can then be employed as part of a larger network of “bots” to target larger and more valuable web sites.

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

The harsh reality is that software-driven bots are trying to break into your website or blog while you are reading these very words. Whether they can achieve this or not, will depend on how difficult or easy you have made things for them to keep persisting until they either work out how to get in, or are forced to give up and decide to look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(Website Security Scan Image source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will return various results and details about your site setup …

(Hackertarget – WP security scan results. Source: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the above tool that if you are able to freely access all of this information, then so can hackers.

(Screenshot image: BlogDefender site)

Being able to see which version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories can all be useful information to hackers, as these can inform them about potential security weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you are not taking appropriate steps to harden your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some time in the near future, someone will attempt to hack your website, because these brute force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Whenever a site gets broken into, blog owners will 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 entirely wiped out. Typically, sites will become infected with malicious scripts without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To avoid the heartache and frustration (and significant financial loss) of having your website or blog 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 listed below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or 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 – Contact Your Hosting Service

Contact your hosting company and ask them exactly what precautions they offer to protect your site from brute-force attacks, and what they do to make sure that your WordPress sites get backed up.

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

Security Measure #2 – Perform Complete WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Or Blog Regularly Up-To-Date

Never rely on your hosting provider for site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or pay someone to get this service done for you and develop a habit of 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 deleted,
• All WP data and files are free of errors, optimized and backed up,
• All WP software, plugins and themes are up-to-date,
• etc …

A full WP maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WP website or blog frequently backed up and updated is. WP site 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 WP maintenance yourself, get someone else to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your website is the second most important thing you should do after making sure that you are still breathing!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Backup, Clone & Keep Your WordPress Websites Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The brute-force attack on WordPress sites was mostly an attempt to compromise site admin panels and gain access to the site by exploiting sites with “admin” as their account name.

For reasons of website security, never install WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area hackers will test. If your site’s username is admin, you will should change it immediately.

We have created a detailed step-by-step tutorial created especially for WP admin users on how to change your login username here: How To Change Your WP Admin Username To A More Secure Username

Security Measure #4 – Choose Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script persistently tries to guess the right username and password characters 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 gets access.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, become very easy targets for brute force attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string that contains at least 8 or 9 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (^%$#&@*).

Roboform is a password software you can use to generate different difficult passwords …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to help you generate hard-to-guess passwords)

We have created a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your password here: How To Change Your Password In WordPress

Security Measure #5 – Secure 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 site, they will typically look for your wp-config.php file, because this file contains important information about your site’s database, 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.

In order to protect your WordPress site from attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent people from being able to easily access 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.

You can remove these files after installation, as they are unnecessary. If you don’t want to delete these files, just rename them.

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

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor feature that allows administrators to edit theme and plugin code inside the dashboard area.

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

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

The WordPress theme editor feature allows anyone accessing your site to view and modify your theme template files, or create havoc on your site.

If you want to prevent people from being able to access 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 – Prevent Access To Your Site’s Uploads Folder

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

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

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, this could 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 called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to ask for assistance from someone with experience if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

A number of great security plugins for WordPress are available that will address many common security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing hackers from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your site from brute-force attacks, 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 issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WordPress total security software)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and addresses 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 Security Plugin For WordPress

(Blog Defender Security Suite For WordPress)

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

BlogDefender shows you where the security weaknesses in your web site are …

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

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

WordPress is a very secure web platform, but neglecting basic maintenance tasks like making sure that your WP core files, WP plugins and themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your website to attacks 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 cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on web security to all WordPress users after the large-scale 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 of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, this information 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 consult a WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, please subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified via email whenever we publish new articles on WordPress security and tutorials about new security plugins.

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