WordPress has been increasingly hijacked by hackers, resulting in loss of access to the site, becoming a stepping stone for spam mails, or being redirected to another overseas site.
In this article, we will explain how to prevent WordPress hijackers from taking over your WordPress site by seizing administrator privileges.
How do hackers take over WordPress?
Once the administrator privileges of WordPress are taken over, hackers can perform a variety of unauthorized activities on WordPress because WordPress has the ability to modify the program from the admin screen.
One of the methods hackers take to hijack WordPress is a brute force attack, in which they mechanically break through the login to the administration screen by trying various password patterns.
This is a method in which a program automatically checks whether login is possible by repeatedly trying to log in to WordPress with hundreds of thousands of passwords. This method allows a hacker who has taken over administrative privileges to write almost any program they want on your site.
How to prevent hijacking through brute force attacks
1 Basics: Make sure your WordPress login password is random, including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols!
You can create a very strong password by going to Administration > User List > Edit User and using the password generator at the bottom of your user profile.
2 Introduction of captcha on the WordPress login screen
The WordPress Doctor Malware Scanning & Security plugin allows you to add a simple calculated quiz, called a captcha, to your login screen.
This can make it difficult for hackers to mechanically repeat login attempts from the login screen.
3 Login lockdown, blocking computes with a large number of repeated login attempts.
It is possible to block a user who has repeated login attempts three times from accessing the site for a certain length of time, or to brute force attack a user who has repeated login attempts (not only on the login screen, but also by using an internal WordPress function called XMLRPC to brute force attack the user’s computer). ), and prevent the hijacking of administrative privileges by blocking access to their computers.
This feature can also be easily enabled with our WordPress Doctor Malware Scanning & Security plugin.
Brute force attacks are difficult to expose because they do no real harm, but they are actually frequent even on small sites. In addition, the hacker’s automated program may repeatedly attempt to log in, causing the site to be overloaded and slowing down the server to a crawl.
IP blocking of brute force attacks is a recommended feature that can also lighten the load on the site.
4 Monitoring Logged-in Users
Our WordPress Doctor Malware Scan & Security plugin also allows you to check the logs of logged-in users with administrative privileges, including their IP, country, time, etc. Check for unrecognized logins here.
Check if logins you don’t remember are recorded here.
If you find any logins that you do not remember, be sure to change the administrator password and scan your WordPress programs for tampering using the plugin’s built-in malware scanner.
5 Keep WordPress and plug-ins updated as often as possible.
Not only brute force attacks, it is also possible to exploit vulnerabilities in WordPress itself or plugins to hijack administrator privileges. Although such vulnerabilities are rare, WordPress is the most popular CMS, used by hundreds of millions of sites,
Even if a rare vulnerability is found, hundreds of thousands of sites can be attacked.
If a CSVV vulnerability is found, it can leave hundreds of thousands of sites vulnerable to attacks.
You can also check the vulnerability of your WordPress site with the Vulnerability Check Tool created by WordPress Doctor.
It is free of charge, so please take advantage of it.
