WordPress is a top CMS. Many website owners use it to create and manage their sites. But you may need to protect your site from WordPress brute force attacks. These attacks come with a lot of consequences for your site. They may even slow down the speed of your website.

The site might become inaccessible. The attackers can then access your valuable information. They can always crack the password of your WordPress admin area and install some kind of malware on it. After that, your website, along with its visitors, faces all the troubles. This article will discuss how to protect your WordPress site from such attacks.

Know What Are the WordPress Brute Force Attacks?

You should be aware of WordPress brute force attacks before we talk about how to defend against them. It is a hacking method. It aims to break into a website using trial-and-error techniques. Hackers use automated apps to send many requests to the target system. With each request, they try to guess the information to unlock it. Such information may be the passwords or PIN codes that will help you unlock the information.

Such tools let hackers hide by using different locations and IPs. This makes it hard for the target system to block such suspicious activities. Hackers can access your WordPress site’s admin panel if they succeed in a brute-force attack. They can do different things after they access your website’s admin panel.

A successful attack on your WordPress site can do anything. It can install backdoors, malware, or delete everything from the database. If they breach your website’s security, they can steal user info. A brute force attack might slow down your WordPress hosting servers. This happens because of so many requests, and sometimes the servers might crash.

Steps to Get Your Website Protected from WordPress Brute-Force Attacks

You know about WordPress brute force attacks. Now, you want to protect your site from them. In this section, we are going to walk you through all the steps on how you can protect your site from such attacks. So keep reading…

Step 1: Install a WordPress Firewall Plugin

If such an attack is attempted, first install a firewall plugin on your WordPress site. Brute force attacks can overload your web server. This makes your site slow to load. As discussed, even failed attacks can slow down or crash your servers.

For these reasons, always handle those requests before they reach your WordPress site’s server. To protect your website from WordPress brute force attacks, install a firewall on it. A firewall comes with all the capabilities to filter out bad traffic from the good one. It also blocks such bad traffic from accessing your website for security purposes. There are two types of firewalls available that you can use on your website to make it more secure.

Application Level Firewall

These firewall plugins can help you with the traffic trying to reach your web server. These firewall plugins track the traffic before loading most site scripts. Most of the time, this method works, but sometimes it’s not so efficient. Brute force attacks can still affect your server. This is true even after installing the application-level firewall plugin.

DNS Level Website Firewall

Most users also use DNS-level website firewall plugins. They also use app-level firewall plugins. To block all suspicious activities, these plugins use their own cloud proxy servers. Requests must pass through them.

With the help of this routing feature, you only get to send genuine traffic to the main hosting server. After it passes through the cloud proxy servers, the traffic is scrutinized. The suspicious traffic gets blocked, and the genuine ones get through. The plugins also improve the site’s speed and performance.

There are certain plugins that you can use to make your website more secure. You can filter out the bad traffic from the good one and block it after it passes through the proxy server. Thus, you can get your site protected from WordPress brute force attacks.

Step 2: Install WordPress Update

With a simple update of WordPress, there are so many issues with your website that you can fix. Your WordPress site has some vulnerabilities. So, it has suffered some common brute-force attacks. You will find these points of vulnerability on your WordPress site if it has an outdated version. If outdated WordPress CMS, plugins, or themes exist, you might face brute-force attacks.

If your website is under WordPress brute force attacks, the plugins might be to blame. Most WordPress plugins are open source. Any issues get fixed without delay. The process to avoid such attacks is to update the plugins and themes on a consistent basis. If you fail to install those updates on your website, you are leaving it vulnerable to threats.

To install the updates, you need to go to the Dashboard of WordPress and then navigate to the Updates section on it. You can only go there after you log in with your admin username and password. This page has all the updates for the core WordPress themes and plugins.

Step 3. Protect WordPress Admin Directory

Protect your site’s admin directory from WordPress brute force attacks. Most attacks aim to access the WordPress admin area. From there, hackers can do whatever they want. In such cases, add a password in the WordPress admin panel to protect the server. This feature lets you block banned access to your WordPress site’s admin panel.

Log in to the web hosting control panel of WordPress, where you have hosted your website. Then, click the Directory Privacy icon in the Files section of the control panel. In this section, you should find the folder called ‘wp-admin’; click on it to open. Then, the cPanel will ask you to provide input for several fields; fill them out. If you have filled in all the information, click the Save button. It will save the changes that you have made in the cPanel of your WordPress site.

These steps should fix any issues with adding a password to your WordPress admin directory. If you added a password in the WordPress admin area, you will see a new login prompt when you visit it. After doing all this, you shouldn’t worry about the WordPress brute force attacks any longer. Sometimes, you might face a 404 error on the website, which might be so annoying. To fix this error, add “Error Document 401 default” to your website’s. Htaccess file. Then, try logging in again.

Step 4: Add Two-Factor Authentication in WordPress

To secure your site, take key steps to stop WordPress brute force attacks. Two-factor authentication is a security step that can prevent those attacks. The two-factor authentication process lets you add extra security to your WordPress site. Everyone must pass a two-factor authentication process to log in to WordPress.

Users must use their registered mobile devices to generate a one-time passcode. This is required for a successful login. A passcode is required to access the WordPress admin area. This two-factor authentication makes it harder for hackers to access your WordPress admin. They cannot get into your admin panel even if they crack the password. So, please add two-factor authentication to your website admin panel. It will help prevent WordPress brute force attacks.

Step 5. Use Unique Strong Passwords

Passwords are the keys to your website. Without them, no one can access it. Always use the strongest, unique passwords for your accounts. Most WordPress brute force attacks are due to easy-to-guess passwords. So, to prevent such attacks, use a strong password for the WordPress admin account. A strong password uses a mix of characters, including numbers and special characters. You should use it on your site.

Always use a strong password for your WordPress admin, FTP, web host, and database. Hackers are always out there. They may launch brute force attacks on WordPress. Or they may destroy your entire website. If you are thinking about the process to remember all the passwords, then don’t worry. Some great password manager plugins can help you. They can store and manage your website’s passwords with strong protection. When you log in, these plugins will auto-fill the fields to get you into the account. So, using a strong, unique password for your accounts ensures the site’s security.

Step 6. Disable Directory Browsing

This is another step to stop WordPress brute force attacks, and you can do so without facing any trouble. When someone types a web address in the browser, it first goes to the server. Then, the server returns a file called index. The server displays the website’s content directory here. It does this if it can’t find an index file in the database.

So, make sure the server finds an index file. Otherwise, users or hackers can access your website’s other contents. During the WordPress brute force attacks, hackers can use this directory to find weak files. In such cases, you might want to prevent access to the content directory of your website. Add this line to the bottom of your WordPress site’s.htaccess file. It will help block those attempts.

Options -Indexes

Step 7. Disable PHP File Execution in Specific WordPress Folders

Sometimes, there may be issues with the WordPress folders. They could have several vulnerabilities. Disabling PHP file execution can prevent most WordPress brute force attacks. Hackers may use WordPress folders to install and run their own PHP scripts to attack. So, WordPress is a platform mainly written in PHP. Because of that, you might not be able to disable it in all its folders.

Some folders in WordPress don’t need PHP scripts to run functions. For example, any file you upload to your WordPress site goes to /wp-content/uploads. To stop WordPress brute force attacks, disable PHP execution in the uploads folder. It’s important to do so because this is the place that hackers use most of the time to hide their backdoor files. In the.htaccess file, type the following line of code and save it to the /wp-content/uploads/ location.

<Files *.php>

deny from all

</Files>

Step 8. Install and Setup a WordPress Backup Plugin

When it comes to the security of the WordPress website, there are many things to be concerned about. Creating backups of your WordPress files is one of them. Backups are the best defense against WordPress brute force attacks. Once hackers gain access to your site, they might destroy all its data and structure. If, after the security steps, your website is still not secure, the backup can fully restore it.

There are many WordPress hosting companies, which come with different backup options for you. The backups that you get from these companies are not optimal. That’s why it’s up to you to make your own backups without depending on the hosting companies. To get rid of the WordPress brute force attacks, you can use some automatic backup plugins for WordPress. You can easily take all your files and automatically back them up to your favorite plugin. The plugins securely make the backups for you without too much hassle.

To Wrap Up

This is where our discussion comes to an end. That’s all you need to know about the steps to prevent WordPress brute force attacks. The article thoroughly discussed all the aspects of the attacks and how you can prevent them. Once, you have followed the steps in a proper manner, then it would become much easier to secure your WordPress site. We hope the article served you well to learn how you can protect your WordPress website from such attacks conveniently. Thank you.

FAQs

1. How do I Password Protect WordPress Admin?

If you want to create a password protected directory, then at first, you have to go to the folder named ‘wp-admin’ and open it. As the next screen appears, you will see options including the one to activate password protection for WordPress. After that, the only thing to do here is to create a username and password which will successfully create the password protected WordPress admin.

2. How WordPress Sites Get Hacked?

It’s a fact that being an open source platform, anyone can penetrate into WordPress. There are so many vulnerabilities in it and people continuously work on its protection. There are so many hackers who take the path of a very least resistance to it. According to some infographic, 41% of different WordPress sites get hacked from the most common points. Hackers get into the website through all the vulnerabilities that you might have in the hosting platform of WordPress.

3. How Secure is WordPress Admin?

There are certain steps that you can follow to make your WordPress admin area more secure.

1. As the wp-admin directory is the heart of any WordPress site so protect it first.
2. Use different Secure Socket Layer certificates to encrypt whatever data you have on the sites.
3. Add all the user accounts with much more care.
4. Change the admin username and password more frequently than ever.
5. Constantly monitor the files of your WordPress website.

4. How do I Make my WordPress Site Secure?

You can follow some easy steps to make your site more secure that you have made from WordPress. To do that follow the 10 most convenient steps.

1. The first concern lies on the hosting company where you are hosting your WordPress site. That’s why choose a well reputed web hosting company.
2. Never use the nulled themes on your WordPress themes.
3. Install some sort of the best WordPress security plugin on the WordPress site.
4. Use a stronger password with several combinations.
5. Disable the file editing feature for your site.
6. Install SSL certificates for an extra layer of security.
7. Change the Wp-login URL to another.
8. Limit the login attempts
9. Hide wp-config.php and .htaccess files from your site view.
10. Update your WordPress version

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