WordPress often comes under attack by hackers, due to its popularity.

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

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

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)

One of the many ways hackers use to try and break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is done using scripts and tools that can work through hundreds of login permutations in minutes.

If you’re using predictable usernames and predictable passwords, your site could be easily hacked by the script’s persistent attempts to guess your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” attack.

Botnet Definition

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 compromised and infected with malicious code or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the computer owners even being aware that this is going on.

Botnets are normally used used to send mass spam emails.

Below is a screenshot taken from an internet security monitoring site showing the locations of the command centers of a botnet that has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009 called “Zeus” …

(The Zeus botnet has been actively infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009. Screenshot image: SecureList.com)

These were highly distributed and well organized botnet 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 worldwide brute-force attacks then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked each day.

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

(WordPress is frequently 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 at all about the security of your online business.

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

It’s important to understand that, in the case of April 2013 mass 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, one of the co-founders of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, made this 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 Blog From Brute-Force Attacks – 10 Security Checks

You may think that the information in your website has no significant value to hackers, but the reality is that all websites are valuable to a malicious user.

If hackers can discover a way to take over your blog, the website or blog can then be used as a “bot” in a planned cyber-attack against more valued web sites.

Additional undesirable consequences of being hacked include being blacklisted by search engines, having stealthy spam links promoting things like gambling, porn, etc. inserted into your content, malicious redirects to phishing sites and other websites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious programs on your visitors’ computers), and many other nasties.

The truth is that software-driven bots are looking for exploits and trying to break into your website while you are reading these very words. Whether they will get in successfully or not, depends on how challenging you have made things for them to keep persisting until they can find how to get access, 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 Hackertarget.com and run your site through their WordPress security scan …

(WP Security Check Product image: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will display a number of results and details about your site …

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

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

(Product image: BlogDefender.com)

Being able 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 are all valuable information to hackers, as this can inform them about any potential security weaknesses, especially where the owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your site or blog is driven by WordPress and you’re not proactive steps to harden your site, then it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point, your site will be hacked, or at least targeted by bots, because these attacks are systematically hitting WordPress installations worldwide!

Typically, when a website or blog is hacked, webmasters can find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their content has been interfered with or even entirely wiped out. Typically, most compromised sites will be infected with malicious software without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

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

Note: A few of the steps below require some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you are not technical, or don’t want to mess around with code on your site, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress technical provider for assistance.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Hosting Service Provider

Get in touch with your host and ask them exactly what precautions are in place to protect your site from brute force attacks, and what they are doing to ensure that your files and data are being backed up.

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

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

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

A proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A complete WordPress site maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP site regularly backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Screenshot image: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how important it is to maintain your WordPress site regularly backed up and updated. WP site 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 WordPress maintenance yourself, pay a professional to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your site 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 files manually, there are many WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Backup, Duplicate & Keep Your WP Websites And Blogs Protected With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

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

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

For reasons of website security, don’t set up WordPress sites with the username “admin”. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your blog’s user name is admin, change it immediately.

We have created a simple tutorial for WordPress admin users that shows you how to change your admin username here: Changing Your WP Username From Admin To A More Secure Username

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when a malicious script 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 from happening (see further below for a couple of simple and effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just continue to attack your site until it eventually “cracks” the code.

Passwords that are easy to guess, therefore, become really easy targets for bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password combination to something that is at least eight characters long, and that includes upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (e.g. ^, $, *, etc).

If you have trouble coming up with strong passwords or are reluctant to set up different passwords for all of your online logins, then use a password management tool like Roboform …

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

We have created a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to change your WordPress password here: What To Do If You Need To Change WordPress Passwords

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

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

(WordPress WP Config file)

If a hacker breaks into your site, they will search for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your 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 accessible. 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

Rename or delete 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 remove these files, just rename them.

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

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

Make sure to always keep all of your application files, themes, plugins, etc. up-to-date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your Theme Editor

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

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor via the main menu)

This allows anyone accessing your site to view and edit your theme template files, and create mayhem 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 editing your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Remove Access To Your WordPress Uploads Folder

The WordPress “uploads” folder stores all the media that gets uploaded to your website.

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

(WordPress uploads folder)

If any directories in your website have weaknesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, this could threaten 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 a blank file named “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to seek professional help if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – Install Security Plugins

Several security plugins for WordPress are available that will address many common security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to vital areas of your site, protecting your website 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 does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing issues that could lead to hackers accessing your site 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 fixing 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

(Blog Defender Security Solution For WordPress Sites)

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

BlogDefender shows you where the security holes in your WordPress site are …

And lets you quickly and easily fix these …

If you don’t want to invest in a premium security plugin like SecureScanPro or BlogDefender, then use various free WordPress 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 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, securing your site is something you cannot afford to ignore.

As one last reminder of the importance of keeping your websites protected, below is the advice given by an expert on web security to all WordPress users after the mass 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, website security is very important if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the above 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 seek help from a WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, please subscribe to WPCompendium.org to be notified whenever we publish new tips on WordPress security and reviews of new WordPress security plugins and solutions.

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