How to prevent brute force attacks on your WordPress Website

Brute force attacks happen more often than you might think, which is why it is important to take measures to prevent them. A victim of a successful attack could have their brand defaced, lose all of its content or have all access to business emails lost. If you have not recently backed up your website, you could lose large portions of it too. 

Fortunately, there are ways for us to make your business safer on WordPress. We firmly believe it is better to be proactive and that couldn’t be more true for when it comes to internet security. Putting in measures now to prevent brute force attacks could save you a lot of time and money in the long run. 

How do brute force attacks work? 

While there are many ways to do a brute force attack on a website, it usually comes down to guessing. A hacker will most likely do this manually or with the use of an automated program. In both scenarios, many different login attempts will happen until a weakness is found and once that happens, they break-in. 

In this article, we are going to cover 5 of the best ways you can prevent that from happening to your business website. 

How to prevent brute force attacks. 

WordPress makes up for a large percentage of every website found on the web. This means that even by pure statistics, they fall victim to many of these attacks. Out the box, WordPress too comes with a few weak spots that hackers can abuse, many of these WordPress handles in their updates which is why it is always important to update your WordPress website. Apart from updates, there are a few other steps we can take to ensure that our business websites and client information is kept even safer. 

Make strong login details. 

Brute force attacks usually give up on a website when the standard set of weak passwords do not work. This still does not stop over 80% of hacks coming from either stolen or weak passwords. Here is our list of strong password requirements that you can use to compare the strength of your own. 

• Use around 15 characters. 
• Mix upper and lower case with numbers and symbols. 
• Use unique words, avoiding anything to do with personal information. 
• Make sure you have not used this password before. 

Passwords that are made with the above in mind may be difficult to remember, so using a good and trustworthy password manager may help, especially if you manage many different logins. 

Install a firewall. 

WordPress does not come with a firewall attached which leaves your website vulnerable to many kinds of hacks. They prevent brute force attacks, detect malicious traffic and allow you to block potentially harmful IPs. Many firewalls also come the ability to ad CAPTCHA to your logins and geoblocking. 

While WordPress doesn’t supply one, it does have the advantage of allowing third parties from making incredibly helpful plugins. A good security plugin will often come with a firewall as well as many other helpful features. 

Limit login attempts. 

By nature, a brute force attack relies on the fact that WordPress usually allows an infinite amount of login attempts. This means that hackers can leave an automated program running until they feel like giving up. When you set a limit to the number of times a login attempt may happen, your business website will block all attempts for a set period.  

This security tip will usually turn all but the more determined hacker away from your website. However, the more determined hacker will change their IP address or attack from multiple IPs at the same time. You too can fall for this security step if you forget your own password, adding an annoying but needed wait before you can try again. 

Use two-factor authentication. 

By adding an extra step to your login, two-factor authentication can make your website almost impervious to brute force attacks. When set up, after the correct login details were entered, you will receive a private code to your email or phone that you will have to enter to complete the login. 

Two-factor authentication can be bypassed, but it will prevent even more brute force attacks before they can even start. 

Make your WordPress website secure from any kind of attack. 

To truly be safe on the internet, your business website needs to be made secure from all kinds of hacks. This means knowing how they work and being able to analyze a website for potential weaknesses. That is why we at Web2Web have a team of WordPress experts that know the ins and outs of website. We design and develop with the best security in mind so that your website can prevent hacks like brute force attacks any many more. If you want your website to be safer or want to create a website that is secure, talk to us about how we can make that happen.