WordPress is often the target of malicious attacks by hackers, due to its global popularity.

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

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

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 can be achieved using scripts and software tools that can guess hundreds of login possibilities in minutes.

If you’re using obvious user names and predictable passwords, your site could be easily hacked by a malicious script’s persistent attempts to guess your site’s login details.

This is called a “brute force” 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/botnet)

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

Botnets are typically used to send out mass spam emails from computers of unsuspecting users.

Below is a screenshot taken from a site that monitors online security showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively infecting computer networks all around the world since 2009 …

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

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

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

(WordPress powers millions of websites worldwide, making it a natural target for hackers)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

No. In fact, there are many great reasons why you should choose WordPress if you are concerned at all about the security of your website.

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

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, said this 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 Site From Being Brute-Force Attacked – 10 Security Points

You may think that your site is of no interest to hackers, but the reality is that to a hacker, every website is an opportunity to benefit or profit at your expense.

If a malicious user can find a way to control your web site, the blog can then be employed as a “bot” in a planned cyberattack against more valuable sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of being hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by Google, having stealthy spam links promoting things like gambling, porn, etc. inserted into 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 malicious bots are most likely trying to hack into your web site as you are reading this page right now. Whether they can break into your site successfully depends on how hard you have made things for hackers to continue trying until they either work out a way to get access, or decide to look for an easier target.

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

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

(Hackertarget – Website Security Check Screenshot: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the check will return various results and information about your site setup …

(WordPress security check results. Source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Product image: BlogDefender site)

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 on your server can be valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any exploitable vulnerabilities, especially where site owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your website runs on WordPress and you’re not preventive steps to harden your site, then we can practically guarantee that, at some point, someone will attempt to hack your website, because these attacks are systematically targeting WordPress sites worldwide!

Typically, whenever a site is broken into, webmasters will find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or that everything has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most sites will be infected with malicious software or viruses without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To avoid the heartache and frustration that comes with discovering that your web site has been hacked into, below are ten 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 steps shown below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress or server files. If you are not technical-minded, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress service provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Get In Touch With Your Host

Contact your webhosting service and ask them exactly what security precautions they have put in place to protect your site from botnet attacks, and what is done to make sure that your site files get regularly backed up.

Check that your web host is backing up your server files and that, if disaster strikes, you can easily recover your site.

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

You should never rely on your web host for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or pay someone to 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 proper WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

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

A full WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress website completely backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image source: WPTrainMe.com)

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

If you don’t want to perform manual backups, there are many free and paid WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can automate your backup process here: Back Up, Clone And Protect Your WP Website With Backup Creator WP Plugin

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

the worldwide brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise site administrator panels by exploiting WordPress sites that used “admin” as their user name.

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

For a tutorial created especially for non-technical WordPress users that shows you how to change your WordPress admin username, go here: How To Change Your Admin User Name In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Use Strong Passwords

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software persistently hits a login or password field with different character strings trying to guess the right login combination that will give them access to your site.

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

Weak passwords, therefore, become very easy targets for hacking attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string that contains at least 8 characters long, with both upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (%^#$@&*).

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

(You can use a password software tool like Roboform to generate strong login passwords)

We have created a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your admin password here: How 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 file)

If hackers break into your WordPress site, they will normally search for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database information, 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 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

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

You can remove these files after installation, as they are unnecessary. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Upgrade Your WordPress CMS, Themes & Plugins To Their Latest Version

Hackers search for vulnerabilities in outdated versions of WordPress that can be exploited, including outdated versions of themes and plugins.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor that allows the administrator to edit theme and plugin code from the dashboard area.

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

(Accessing the WordPress theme editor using the dashboard menu)

The WordPress theme feature lets anyone accessing your site view and edit your theme files, and cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent unauthorized people from accessing your 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 – Secure The WordPress Uploads Directory

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

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

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, this can compromise the security of your site.

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 file with nothing in it called “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 – Use WordPress Security Plugins

Several security plugins for WordPress are available that specifically address most common security issues WordPress website owners face, such as preventing hackers from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your site from malicious exploits, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

Many 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 damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – security plugin for WordPress)

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

Another plugin you may want to consider using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender WordPress Security Product Suite

(Blog Defender)

This product is a suite 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 fix these …

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

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WP installation, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes are kept up-to-date, tightening file and data security and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to attacks 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 site.

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

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to be notified whenever we publish new articles on WordPress security and tutorials about new WordPress security plugins.

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