Being the world’s most popular content management system makes WordPress an easy target for hacking attacks.

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

These attacks were caused by botnets (computers infected with viruses and programmed to attack other sites 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 methods hackers use to try and break into WordPress sites. One of these is by trying to guess the site’s administration login username and password. This is achieved using software programs that automatically tries to guess hundreds of possible login combinations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable usernames and passwords that are easy to guess, your site can be easily hacked by a malicious software’s persistent attempts to guess your site’s login details.

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)

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

Botnets are regularly used to blast out mass spam emails.

The screenshot below was taken from an internet security monitoring site showing the locations of the command centers of a botnet that has been actively infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009 called “Zeus” …

(ZeuS is a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the globe since 2009. Source: 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 millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress user administration areas took place. The mass attack continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked every day.

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

(WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS making it a frequent target for hacker attacks)

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

No. In fact, there are lots of good reasons why you should use WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your online business.

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

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

Mike Little, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, 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 Being Brute-Force Attacked – Ten Security Checks

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

If a hacker can discover a security weakness in your system that allows them to gain stealth control of your website or blog, the website can then be employed as a “bot” to attack larger and more highly-valued websites.

Additional undesirable results of having your site hacked include getting blacklisted by search engines, having spammy links promoting things like viagra, porn, etc. in your content, malicious redirects to phishing sites and 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 software-driven bots are very likely trying to hack into your blog right now. Whether they will successfully get in or not, depends on how hard or easy you can make it for them to keep persisting until they can discover a way to get in, or decide to look for a less secure target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – WP Security Scan Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the scan will yield a number of results and information about your WordPress site …

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

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

(Screenshot image: Blog Defender)

The ability to see what version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed on your site, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories can all be valuable information to hackers, as this can inform them about any exploitable security weaknesses, especially in older versions.

If your website is driven by WordPress and you’re not taking appropriate steps to bolster the security of your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point, 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, when a site gets hacked, webmasters will find themselves “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 sites will be infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner even being aware that this has taken place.

To help avoid the heartache of discovering that your site has been hacked into, below are ten essential and effective security measures that will help to protect your WordPress site from brute-force attacks.

Note: Some of the recommended steps shown below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress and server files. If you have no web skills, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, 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 Host

Get in touch with your hosting company and ask them what security precautions have been put into place to protect your site from being attacked, and what is done to make sure that your WordPress sites get regularly backed up.

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

Security Measure #2 – Perform Full WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Or Blog Regularly Maintained

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

A complete WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A proper WP site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress website or blog regularly backed up and up-to-date is vitally important for WordPress security. Screenshot image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important maintaining your WP web site completely backed up and up-to-date is. WordPress maintenance is not hard or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website or blog. If you don’t want to learn how to do WP site maintenance yourself, pay a professional to do it but make sure it gets done. Backing up your site is the second most important thing you should do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your files manually, there are a number of 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 & Protect Your WP Site With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

the worldwide brute-force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise site administrator panels and gain access to sites by exploiting sites that used “admin” as their user name.

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

For a step-by-step tutorial for non-technical WordPress admin users on how to change your admin username, go here: Changing Your WP User Name From Admin To A More Secure Username

Security Measure #4 – Choose Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script persistently hits a login or password field with different strings of characters 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 from happening (see further below for a couple of simple and effective ways to do this), the “bot” will just keep attacking your site until it eventually works out the combination.

Weak passwords, therefore, are very easy targets for brute force attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to something that is at least eight or nine characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, and “special” characters (e.g. %, $, *, etc).

You can use a password program like Roboform to help you generate secure passwords …

(You can use a password management program like Roboform to help you generate hard-to-guess 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 – Prevent The wp-config.php File From Being Accessed

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

(WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your website, they will normally try to access the wp-config.php file, because this is the file that contains your WordPress database information, 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.

To protect your WordPress site from being attacked and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent your wp-config.php file from being 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 Website Installation Files

Delete or rename the install.php, upgrade.php and readme.html files from your server.

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

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

Hackers are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress that can be exploited, including out-of-date versions of WordPress 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 installations come with a built-in editor feature that allows site administrators to edit theme and plugin files from the dashboard.

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

(The WordPress theme editor can be accessed using the WP main menu)

This allows anyone accessing your site’s admin area to view and edit your WordPress files, or create havoc on your site.

If you want to prevent unauthorized 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 – Secure The Site’s Uploads Directory

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

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

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this could seriously threaten 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, adding a blank index.php file (this is literally a blank file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to hire a professional if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Use WordPress Security Plugins

Several WordPress security plugins are available that will address many common security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing unauthorized users from accessing your site, protecting your site from botnets, preventing injections of code into files, 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 issues that could lead to hackers accessing your website files and causing damage to your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – WordPress security software solution)

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

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

Blog Defender Security Plugin

(Blog Defender)

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

BlogDefender shows you where the security weaknesses in your website are …

And lets you easily fix these …

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

WordPress is a secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like making sure that your WP core files, WordPress plugins and WordPress 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.

Regardless of the type 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 securing your website.

As a final reminder, below is the advice given by a web security expert to all WordPress users following the global brute-force attacks by botnets 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 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 WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified via email when we publish new tips on WordPress security and reviews of new security plugins and solutions.

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