WordPress is often the target of malicious attacks by hackers.

In early 2013 a global brute force attack hit WordPress installations across almost every WP hosting server in existence.

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

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

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’s administration login username and password. This is done using software tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of possible logins in minutes.

If you’re using weak login details, your website could be an easy target for hackers.

This is called a “brute-force” login 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/botnet)

”Botnets” are networks of private computers that have been infected with malicious code or software, which are then controlled remotely as a group, often without the unsuspecting computer owners’ knowledge or awareness.

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

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

(The Zeus botnet has been actively compromising computer networks all around the world since 2009. Image source: SecureList.com)

These botnet attacks are highly distributed and well organized. 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 site admin areas occurred. The brute-force attacks continued after this, with over 30,000 WordPress blogs being hacked each day.

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

(WordPress often is targeted by hackers)

Does This Mean We Should Stop Using WordPress?

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

To understand why WordPress is a secure web platform, read this article: Are Open Source Platforms Like WordPress Secure?

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

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress with Matt Mullenweg, said this 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)

Preventing Your WordPress Blog From Being Brute-Force Attacked – 10 Security Measures

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

If someone can exploit a security flaw in your system and gain remote access of your blog, that blog can then be employed as part of a larger network of “bots” to target other valued sites.

Additional undesirable effects of having your website hacked and your site security compromised include being blacklisted by Google, having spammy links advertising things like viagra, discounted fashion, etc. in your content, malicious redirects to phishing sites, drive-by downloads (adding malicious programs on your visitors’ computers), and many other nasty things.

The harsh reality is that software-driven bots are most likely searching for security weaknesses and trying to break into your site while you are reading this page right now. Whether they can break into your site will depend on how hard you will make things for hackers or botnets to keep trying until they discover a way to get access, or are forced to decide to look for a less secure target.

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

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 various results and details about your site …

(Hackertarget – website security check results. Screenshot source: Hackertarget.com)

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

(Screenshot: BlogDefender.com)

The ability to see which 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 useful information to hackers, as this informs them about exploitable security vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

If your website is powered by WordPress and you’re not taking steps to bolster the security of your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point, someone will attempt to hack your website, because these attacks are systematically targeting WordPress sites worldwide!

When a website is broken into, webmasters can find themselves completely “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been interfered with or even that their content has been entirely wiped out. Typically, most compromised sites will be infected with malicious scripts without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache (and potential financial loss) of discovering that your web 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 measures shown below need some technical understanding of how 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

Contact your webhosting provider and ask them exactly what measures are in place to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what is done to ensure that your files and data get backed up.

Check that your host backs up your sites and that, if anything should happen, you can easily get your files and data back.

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

Never rely on your webhosting company for site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain your WordPress site or get this service done for you and develop a habit of performing a full WordPress 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 deleted,
• All files and data are free of errors, optimized and backed up,
• All software, plugins and themes are up-to-date,
• etc …

A complete WordPress maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WordPress web site regularly 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 regularly 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 don’t want to learn how to do WP site 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 should do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your site manually, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Backup, Copy & Keep Your WP Websites And Blogs Protected With Backup Creator WordPress Plugin

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

The mass brute force botnet attack on WordPress is mostly an attempt to compromise website administrator panels and gain access to sites by exploiting sites using “admin” as their user name.

For reasons of website security, avoid installing sites with the username admin. This is the first area hackers will test. If your blog’s username is “admin”, then change it immediately.

For a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to change your admin username, go here: How To Change Your WordPress Admin Username

Security Measure #4 – Make Sure Your Password Is Strong

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually and persistently hits a login or password field with different strings of characters trying to guess the right login combination that will give the hacker entry to your site.

Unless some measure is put into place to stop 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 bot attacks. Make sure that you change your password to a string that contains at least eight or nine characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, and add a few “special” characters (%^#$@&*).

Roboform is a password management software that lets you create different strong login passwords …

(Roboform is a password software you can use to generate very secure passwords)

We have created a tutorial on how to change your WordPress password here: What To Do If You Need To Reset Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Protect Your wp-config.php File

The wp-config.php file allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data and is used to define advanced WordPress options.

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your WordPress site, they will typically 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 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 attacks and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, you must prevent people getting 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 Installation Files

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

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 – Keep Your WordPress Installation, Themes & Plugins Up-To-Date

Hackers are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities they can exploit in outdated versions of WordPress, including outdated versions of WP themes and plugins.

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

Security Measure #8 – Disable The WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress comes with a built-in editor feature that allows the site administrator to edit plugin and theme files inside the dashboard area.

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

(The WordPress theme editor is accessible via the admin menu)

This means that anyone logging into your site’s admin can view and change your theme template files, or create havoc on your site.

To prevent 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 Folder

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

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

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any files stored in his folder have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious users, someone could upload unauthorized file types to 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, uploading a blank index.php file (this is literally a blank file called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to hire a professional if you are not sure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

There are some great WordPress security plugins available that will address most security issues faced by WordPress website owners, such as preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to vital information about your site, protecting your site from brute-force attacks, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

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

(SecureScanPro – total security software for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and fixes 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 Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

And lets you fix these quickly and easily …

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 very secure web platform, but neglecting basic maintenance tasks like ensuring that your WP software, plugins and themes are kept updated to their latest versions, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.

As one last reminder, below is the advice given by an expert on website security to all WordPress users following the worldwide brute force attacks by botnets 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 of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has provided you with the initial steps you need to take 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 professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a professional WordPress service provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

Also, do yourself a favor and subscribe to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications whenever we publish new articles on WordPress security and reviews of WordPress security plugins.

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