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

In early 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to large-scale brute-force attacks.

These attacks were caused by computers infected with malware and programmed to attack other vulnerable installations (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 a WordPress site. One of these is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is achieved with software programs that can work through hundreds of possible login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using weak usernames and weak passwords that are easy to guess, your site can be an easy target for hackers.

This is called a “brute force” attack.

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.org)

A “Botnet” is a network of computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, typically without the unsuspecting computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

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

Below is a screenshot 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 globe since 2009 called “Zeus” …

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

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

Coverage of this worldwide brute-force botnet attack was widely reported in 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 …

(Being the world’s most popular content management system makes WordPress an obvious target for attempted hacker attacks)

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

No. In fact, there are many great reasons why you should use WordPress if you are concerned about the security of your online presence.

To learn why WordPress is a secure web platform, read this article: Can You Build A Secure Business Online Using WordPress? What Every Business Owner Needs To Know About WordPress

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, made this comment 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)

Protecting Your WordPress Blog From Brute-Force Attacks – Ten Security Measures

You may think that the information in your site is of no interest to hackers, but the reality is that every website has some value to a malicious user.

If a malicious user can break in and remotely control your web site, that blog can then be employed to target other highly-valued sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of having your website hacked include getting blacklisted by Google, having spammy links promoting things like casinos, porn, etc. inserted in your content and page title and descriptions, redirecting visitors to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malware on your visitors’ computers), and lots of other nasty things.

The harsh reality is that brute-force software bots are most likely trying to hack into your blog right now. Whether they can break in successfully depends on how hard you can make things for them to keep trying until they discover a way to get access, or decide to look for a less protected 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 website through their WordPress security scan …

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

You will see that the check returns various results and details about your WordPress setup …

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

It should be obvious after using the above tool that if you can freely access all of this information about your blog, hackers can too.

(Screenshot image: BlogDefender.com)

Being able 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 valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about potentially exploitable vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

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

Whenever a website is hacked, webmasters will find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been interfered with or that everything has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most compromised sites will become infected with malicious software or viruses without the owner even being aware that a security breach has occurred.

To help avoid the heartache and frustration of having your site being hacked into, we have listed below 10 essential and effective security checks that will help to protect your WordPress site from being brute force attacked.

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

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

Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them what measures are in place to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to make sure that your site files get backed up.

Make sure that your hosting service is backing up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily get back your files.

Security Measure #2 – Back Up Your WordPress Data And Files And Keep Your Website Frequently Updated

Never rely just on your webhosting provider for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain 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, fortnightly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WP maintenance routine looks like this …

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

Again, we cannot stress enough how important it is to maintain your WP website or blog frequently backed up and up-to-date. WordPress maintenance is not hard to do 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 it 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 a number of free and paid plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your site backups here: Back Up, Copy And Protect Your WP Websites And Blogs With Backup Creator Plugin For WP

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

the worldwide brute-force attack on WordPress is mostly attempting to compromise website admin panels by exploiting WP installations that used “admin” as the user name.

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

For a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your username, go here: How To Change Your Admin User Name In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Choose Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script persistently tries to guess the right password and username character string that will unlock your website.

Unless you put some measure in place to stop the brute force attack (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually “cracks” the code.

Weak passwords, therefore, become very easy targets for hacking attacks. Make sure that you change your password to something containing at least eight characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, combined with a few “special” characters (e.g. ^, #, &, etc).

Roboform is a password program that lets you generate secure passwords …

(You can use a password program like Roboform to create hard-to-crack passwords)

For a tutorial for WordPress admin users on how to change your login password, go here: What To Do If You Need To Change Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To 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 website, they will search for the 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 a hacker 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 easily accessed. 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 Blog Installation Files

Delete or rename 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 Software, Plugins And Themes Up-To-Date

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

Ensure that all of your application 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 site administrators to edit plugin and theme files inside the dashboard area.

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor using the dashboard menu)

This means that anyone logging into your site can view and modify your WordPress theme templates, and create mayhem on your site.

To prevent people from being able to access your 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 The WordPress Uploads Directory

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

By default, this folder is visible to online users. All a person needs to do to see all of the contents stored in the “uploads” directory is visit your directory using a web browser …

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any directories in your website have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers, anyone could upload unauthorized file types or compromise the security of your website.

Protecting your directories will prevent unauthorized people 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 an empty file called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to ask help from someone with experience if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Security Plugins

There are several security plugins for WordPress available that will address most security issues WordPress site owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your files from malicious software, preventing unauthorized file uploads, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – security software 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 great plugin you may want to look at using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender Security Plugin

(Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin)

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

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 invest in a premium security plugin like SecureScanPro or BlogDefender, you can use various free WP plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting basic maintenance tasks like updating your WordPress installation, 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, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your sites.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on website security 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, website security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has given you the initial guidelines and help you need to prevent brute force attacks on your WordPress site. 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.

Also, please remember to subscribe to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications via email when we publish new tutorials on WordPress security and reviews of new WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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