Powering millions of websites and blogs around the world makes WordPress a frequent target for malicious attempts by hackers.

In 2013 a global brute force attack began hitting WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence around the world.

These attacks were caused by computers infected with viruses and programmed to attack other sites (called “botnets”).

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

What Is A Brute-Force Attack?

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)

One of the many ways hackers use to try and break into WordPress sites is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. To achieve this, hackers use scripts and software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re using weak login details, your website can be easily hacked by repeated attempts to work out your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” login attack.

What Are Botnets

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 scripts or software, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners even being aware that this is happening.

Botnets are often used to send out mass spam emails from computers of compromised user accounts.

Below is a screenshot 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 globe since 2009 …

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

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

News of the April 2013 mass brute-force botnet attack was widely reported in all of the major webhosting companiesand leading technology media publications, such as TechNews Daily, Forbes, PC Magazine, BBC News, Tech Crunch, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(WordPress powers millions of websites and blogs around the world, which makes it a frequent target for hacking attacks)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

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

To learn what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites, see this article: Is WordPress Secure?

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 applications like Joomla).

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, 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)

How To Prevent Your WordPress Website From Being Brute Force Attacked – 10 Security Points

Every website with a security vulnerability offers some value to hackers. A vulnerable web site not only presents hackers opportunities to improve their hacking skills and claim “bragging rights” among their peers, but it can also be a platform for DDoS attacks, distributing malware and information theft.

If someone can hack into and gain stealth control of your blog, the website can then be employed as a “bot” to attack larger and more valuable web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of being hacked and your site security compromised include getting blacklisted by Google, having spammy links advertising things like online meds, cheap offers on brand names, etc. in your content and page title and descriptions, malicious redirects 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 reality is that hackers are trying to break into your website or blog right now. Whether they will hack into your site successfully will depend on how hard or easy you can make it for hackers to continue trying until they work out how to break in, or decide to look for a more vulnerable target.

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

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

(WordPress Security Scan Screenshot source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

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

(Hackertarget – WP security check results. Screenshot: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image source: BlogDefender.com)

The ability 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 are all useful information to hackers, as this informs them about potential holes or weaknesses, especially where the owners haven’t updated their files.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you are not proactive steps to toughen up your site, then it’s practically guaranteed 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 targeting WordPress installations all the world!

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

To avoid the heartache and aggravation of having your website being hacked into, we have listed below ten essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from botnet attacks.

Note: Some of the recommended steps below need some technical understanding of how to modify core WordPress and server files. If you have no web editing skills, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or search for a WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

***

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

Contact your webhosting provider and ask them exactly what precautions they offer to protect your site from being attacked, and what they are doing to ensure that your WordPress sites are being backed up.

Make sure that your webhosting provider backs up your sites and that, if disaster strikes, you can quickly and easily recover your files.

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

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

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP website frequently backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WordPress website completely backed up and updated is. WordPress 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 website is the next most important thing you must do after making sure that your heart is still beating!

If you don’t want to back up your data manually, there are many free and paid plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Backup, Duplicate And Keep Your WordPress Websites Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The mass brute force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise website admin panels and gain access to the site by exploiting installations with “admin” as the username.

For reasons of website security, avoid setting up WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first area of potential vulnerability hackers will test. If your site’s user name is admin, then change it immediately.

We have created a detailed tutorial created especially for non-technical admin users that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username here: Changing Your WordPress Admin Username To Another Username

Security Measure #4 – Choose A Strong Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually hits a login or password field with different character strings in an attempt to guess the right login combination that will give them entry to your website.

Unless you put some measure in place to prevent 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 “cracks” the code.

Weak passwords, therefore, are very easy targets for hackers. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string that is at least 8 characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (e.g. ^, $, *, etc).

You can use a password management program like Roboform to generate unguessable passwords …

(Roboform is a password management tool you can use to help you generate strong passwords)

We have created a detailed step-by-step tutorial for non-technical WordPress users that shows you how to change your admin password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Your Password

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Your wp-config.php File From Being Accessed

The wp-config.php file allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data and is used to define advanced WordPress options.

(wp-config.php file)

If a hacker breaks into your WordPress site, they will typically search for your wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains important information about your site’s database, 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 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 Blog 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 CMS, Themes & Plugins Up-To-Date

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

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

(The WordPress theme editor is accessible using the main menu)

The WordPress theme editor lets anyone accessing your site view and edit your WP theme files, and cause havoc on your site.

To prevent 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 – Remove Access To The WordPress Uploads Folder

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

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 visit the directory using their browser …

(WordPress has an uploads folder where media content is stored)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this could 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 an empty file called “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 – Install WordPress Security Plugins

There are a number of security plugins for WordPress available that specifically address most common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing hackers from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your site from brute-force attacks, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

Most 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 potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your website files and causing irreparable damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – total security software solution for WordPress)

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 plugin you may want to look at using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender WordPress Security Solution

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender scans you WordPress installation for potential security weaknesses …

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

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like updating your WordPress installation, WordPress plugins and WP themes, tightening file and data security 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, web security is something you cannot ignore.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on website security to all WordPress users following the global 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

***

As you can see, website security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, 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 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 via email whenever we publish new articles and tutorials on WordPress security and tutorials about new security plugins and solutions.

***

***