Securing WordPress Sites: Preventing Hacks And Protecting User Data
Understanding Common WordPress Vulnerabilities
WordPress sites are often targeted by attackers due to the widespread use of the platform. Some common vulnerability types exploited include SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), brute force attacks against admin credentials, outdated plugins and themes with security flaws, vulnerable FTP configurations, and more. Understanding how these attacks work is key for properly securing a WordPress site.
SQL Injection
SQL injection involves inserting malicious SQL code into application input fields to gain unauthorized access to the database. Attackers exploit improper input validation and escaping by injecting manipulative SQL statements. Successful SQL injection can read, modify, and delete sensitive data, execute admin commands, intercept sessions, and more. WordPress sites are often targeted for SQL injection at vulnerable contact forms, login pages, search bars, and comments sections. Input validation and prepared parameterized statements can help prevent first-order SQL injection on WordPress sites.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
XSS attacks inject malicious scripts into a vulnerable web page viewed by other users. Stored XSS persists the malicious script on the target servers while reflected XSS delivers the payload through manipulated links targeting victims. Successful XSS can steal session cookies, compromise accounts, redirect victims, and install keyloggers. WordPress sites are prone to XSS attacks via comments, contact forms, vulnerable plugins and themes. Escaping untrusted output and validating/sanitizing user input can help thwart XSS attacks.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CSRF tricks logged-in victims into unknowingly executing actions via malicious links. Successful CSRF attacks can change passwords, modify data, post content, and more by riding on the victim’s session cookie. WordPress admin accounts are often targeted for account takeover via CSRF. Requiring POST requests, validating origin header/referrer, and using CSRF tokens can help block CSRF attacks.
Brute Force Attacks
Brute force attacks continuously guess passwords and usernames using common defaults and wordlists. Successful brute force attacks on WordPress can lead to admin account takeover. WordPress sites frequently rely on weak admin credentials vulnerable to credential stuffing as well. Requiring strong passwords via policy, multifactor authentication, CAPTCHAs, lockouts after failed attempts, IP blocking, and hiding admin URI can impede brute force credential attacks.
Hardening Your WordPress Configuration
Properly configuring a WordPress site is critical for security. From strong password policies to restrictive file permissions, a hardened configuration significantly reduces exposure to attacks.
Enforcing Strong Passwords
Weak passwords are one of the easiest attack vectors allowing everything from admin account takeover to unauthorized content entry. Enforce mandatory strong passwords for all WordPress user accounts including admins, editors, authors, contributors, and subscribers. Strong password policies require adequate password length, complexity with different character sets, and frequent rotation. This frustrates brute force, dictionary, and guessing attacks.
Limiting Login Attempts
An unlimited number of login attempts facilitates brute force attacks. Restrict the number of login tries both per user and at the installation level based on source IP and user agent string. Lockout user accounts after a reasonable bad attempt threshold prompting administrators for manual authorization. This significantly slows and complicated password guessing attacks.
Disabling File Editing
Editable plugins, themes, and other code files enable attackers to directly alter site behavior, serve malware, cause denial of service, and more. Disable the file editor in WordPress removing install.php and limiting access to wp-config.php and php.ini. This forces code modification through Git or SFTP helping ensure code integrity.
Using SFTP Instead of FTP
FTP passes credentials in cleartext enabling sniffing attacks while lacking granular access controls. Transition all file transfers from FTP to secure SFTP providing encrypted transports and fine-grained permission management. SFTP significantly reduces MITM attacks, blocks protocol downgrade efforts, and enables least-privilege file system access.
Updating Frequently
Core, plugin, themes, and other dependencies become vulnerable over time. Rapidly deploying updates for WordPress and all integrated software is critical. Enable automatic background updates for WordPress and consider authorized automated updates for plugins/themes. Subscribe to release notifications while monitoring logs after upgrades to catch issues early.
Leveraging Security Plugins
Security-oriented plugins provide heuristic scans, attack detections, blocks, extra hardening, and more protective measures by default lacking in basic WordPress. Utilize these specialized security plugins to significantly enhance the defense of WordPress sites beyond baseline measures.
Using Wordfence for Malware Scanning
Wordfence provides real-time malware detection by scanning file contents, configurations, database entries, and traffic for malicious URLs, code, commands, and payloads. Integrating Wordfence identifies backdoors, credential stealers, remote access tools, rootkits, bots, miners, phishing skimmers, and more. It automatically blocks attacks using vulnerability signatures supplemented by IP reputation services and custom threat intelligence.
Enforcing Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication (2FA) requires users provide both something you know (passwords) and something you have (OTP code). 2FA ensures stolen credentials alone are inadequate for system access. WordPress two-factor plugins like Duo bring mandatory 2FA for admins via mobile apps, SMS texts, phone calls, and hardware tokens. This greatly reduces unauthorized admin login risk.
Preventing Brute Force Attacks
Plugins like All In One WP Security enable brute force attack prevention lacking in base WordPress installations. Features include login cooldowns, blacklists for failed logins, quality and quantity password constraints, multi-factor authentication, hidden admin URLs, and integration with services like Google reCAPTCHA for human verification checks before logging in. These frustrate credential stuffing, online password attacks, and account takeover efforts.
Monitoring Traffic and Events
Carefully monitoring site traffic, events, metrics, logs, and audit data enables identifying attacks succeeding baseline controls. Ongoing attack detection through outbound monitoring properly surfaces compromise indicators despite environment hardening and defense-in-depth protections for rapid incident response.
Reviewing Logs for Signs of Attack
WordPress logs record valuable forensic evidence surrounding malicious requests, failed access attempts, file and data changes, errors, shutdown events, and more. Centralized logging correlated against threat intelligence reveals attack narratives across impacted endpoints. Detect blocklist hits, administrative actions, privilege abuse, structure alterations, suspicious access points, and payload delivery through log analysis.
Getting Notified on Key Events
Alert promptly on security-impacting events from plugins, endpoints, and cloud services monitoring WordPress to accelerate incident response. Generate notifications on administrator login, content policy violations, malicious uploads, blocked attacks, diagnostics failures, software misconfigurations, outage events, and more high-priority issues requiring further actions.
Tracking Visitor Geolocation
Collecting IP, GPS coordinates, proxy use, languages, and other metadata surrounding visitors then comparing against past baseline traffic patterns detects web scraping, content theft, comment spam, brute force attacks, and other malicious access more readily. Many WordPress monitoring plugins gather and assess user-agents, referrers, bot indicators, and geo-data.
Backing Up WordPress
Consistent backups save WordPress sites when all other security controls fail. Attackers often damage databases, content, and configurations requiring restoration. Automate WordPress site backups while securing copies off-server with isolated access for reliable disaster recovery.
Automating Backups
Manual backups quickly grow inconsistent as administrators become busy often getting skipped. Automate daily or weekly WordPress database, files, plugin, and content backups to ensure minimal downtime and data loss when compromised. Many plugins facilitate automatic WordPress backup to various storage providers.
Storing Backups Off-Server
Backups require isolated off-server storage secured from production access to ensure availability when on-site data gets encrypted, deleted, or otherwise destroyed. Enable WordPress backup plugins sending protected copies to cloud storage buckets inaccessible directly from compromised production endpoints.
Testing Restore Process
Untested backup procedures often fail when disasters strike due to misconfigurations, compatibility issues, unmet dependencies, or format errors. Frequently spin up disposable sandbox WordPress instances then test restoring plugin settings, site content, media files, themes, and database backups validating a working recovery process. This confirms backups properly support failover and business continuity needs after adverse events.
