Being the world’s most popular CMS makes WordPress an obvious target for attacks by malicious users.

In 2013 a worldwide brute-force attack struck WordPress installations on almost every WP hosting server in existence.

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

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

About 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 admin’s login username and password. This is done using scripts and software that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using easy-to-guess login details, your site can be easily hacked by the software’s persistent attempts to guess your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute-force” login attack.

What Is A Botnet?

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 compromised and infected with malicious code, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

Botnets are regularly used to blast mass spam emails from computers of unsuspecting users.

The screenshot below was taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the globe since 2009 …

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

The botnet attacks are highly distributed and well organized. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by several webhosting companies in the initial attack, when millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress site admin areas took place. The brute-force attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked per day.

Coverage of the April 2013 brute force attack was reported by all of the major webhosting companies, as well as the leading technology media publications, such as Forbes, TechNews Daily, BBC News, Tech Crunch, PC Magazine, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(WordPress powers millions of websites worldwide, making it a frequent target for hacking attacks)

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

No. In fact, there are lots of great reasons why you should continue using WordPress if you are concerned at all about website security.

We explain why WordPress is a secure web platform in this article: Can You Build A Secure Business Online Using WordPress? What Every Website Owner Needs To Know About WordPress Security

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders 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)

Protecting Your WordPress Blog From Being Brute-Force Attacked – 10 Security Checks

You may think that your website offers little to no value to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website provides an opportunity to benefit or profit at your expense.

If someone can discover a web software flaw, your blog can then be employed as a “bot” to attack other highly-valued websites.

Additional undesirable effects of having your website hacked include being blacklisted by Google, having spammy links advertising things like casinos, discounted fashion, etc. inserted into your content, redirecting visitors to phishing sites or other websites, drive-by downloads (adding malware on your visitors’ computers), and many other nasties.

The truth is that brute-force software bots are most likely looking for vulnerabilities and trying to break into your site while you are reading this article right now. Whether they can achieve this or not, depends on how hard or easy you can make it for hackers to continue persisting until they discover a way to get access, or give up and decide to look for an easier target.

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

If you visit a site like Hackertarget.com and run your site through their WordPress security check …

(WP Security Check Product image source: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the test will yield a number of results and details about your WordPress installation …

(website security scan results. Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the above tool that if you can see all of this information, hackers can too.

(Product image source: BlogDefender website)

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 all be potentially useful information to hackers, as these can inform them about exploitable holes or weaknesses, especially where site owners haven’t updated their files.

If your site or blog is driven by WordPress and you are not taking appropriate steps to bullet-proof your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these brute-force attacks are systematically targeting WordPress installations around the world!

Typically, whenever a website gets broken into, webmasters will discover much to their dismay that they have been “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been interfered with or even that their content has been completely wiped out. Typically, compromised sites will be infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To avoid the heartache and aggravation (and significant financial loss) of having your web site being hacked into, below are 10 simple, yet essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

Note: A few of the recommended measures listed below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you lack these technical 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 – Get In Touch With Your Webhosting Service Provider

Get in touch with your webhosting provider and ask them exactly what measures they offer to protect your site from being attacked, and what they do to make sure that your files and data get backed up.

It’s important to check that your webhosting provider backs up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily recover your files.

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

You should never rely just on your web 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 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 WordPress data and files are free of errors, optimized and backed up,
• All plugins, themes and software components are up-to-date,
• etc …

A full WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important maintaining your WordPress installation regularly backed up and updated is. WP 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 WordPress site maintenance yourself, get someone else to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your website is the second most important thing you should do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are a number of plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your site backups here: Backup, Duplicate And Protect Your WP Websites And Blogs With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

The brute force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly attempting to compromise website administrator panels by exploiting WordPress sites that used “admin” as the account name.

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

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial for non-technical WordPress users on how to change your WordPress admin username, go here: How To Change Your Admin User Name In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Choose A Strong Password

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

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

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, become really easy targets for attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string containing at least eight characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (e.g. ^, #, &, etc).

Roboform is a password tool you can use to generate different hard-to-guess passwords …

(You can use a password management program like Roboform to help you generate strong passwords)

For a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your login password, go here: What To Do If You Need To Change Your Password

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 try to access 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, 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 – Delete Or Rename Unnecessary WP Installation Files

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

These files are completely unnecessary after installation and can be deleted. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Keep Your WordPress Installation, Themes And Plugins Up-To-Date

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

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor feature that allows administrators to edit plugin and theme files from the dashboard area.

You can access the WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor in your dashboard menu …

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the dashboard menu)

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your blog’s admin area view and modify your theme files, and create 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 adding code to your wp-config.php file.

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

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

Normally, this folder is visible to all users online. All someone has to do to see all of the contents in your “uploads” directory is visit the directory using a web browser …

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, someone can upload unauthorized file types to 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, adding a blank index.php file (this is literally a file with nothing in it named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to consult a professional if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use Security Plugins

Some great WordPress security plugins are available that will address most common security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to vital areas of your site, protecting your site from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – complete security plugin for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and does a great job of addressing 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 Security Plugin For WordPress

(Blog Defender Security Plugin For WordPress Sites)

Blog Defender is a package of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus WordPress security documentation in PDF and DOC formats.

BlogDefender scans you WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities …

And lets you quickly and easily fix these …

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

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like keeping your WordPress software, plugins and WP themes up-to-date, tightening file and data protection 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 cannot ignore the importance of securing your website.

As a final reminder of the importance of website security, below is the advice given by a web security expert to all WordPress users following 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 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 WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, do yourself a favor and subscribe to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications when we publish new tips on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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