Read these tips to protect your WordPress site from 7 typical types of WordPress attacks.

WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. It has more than 50,000 plugins and themes that make it easy for both experts and beginners to make beautiful, professional websites. But because WordPress is very popular, has a large number of users, and offers free development tools, it is a popular target of cybercriminals who take advantage of its weaknesses to do harm.

The FBI reported a 300 percent increase in cyber crimes since the COVID-19 outbreak began. 

WordPress is maintained by a team of highly experienced developers who work hard to ensure that the platform is secure. However, it’s pretty common for website owners to use a range of WordPress plugins and third-party themes. This adds extra code to your site, which means more potential loopholes that a hacker could exploit.

People who are just starting out with WordPress or have small sites often think they don’t need to worry about security. They think their site is too small and unimportant for hackers to care about. This idea is not right. Hackers get into WordPress sites of all sizes.

If you haven’t created a backup, you might discover that a hacker deleted your entire site, leaving you with no hope of retrieving your content.

This kind of bad behavior could cause customers to lose trust, sales, and money. There’s also a chance that the search engines will ban your site.

Common WordPress attacks

Here are 7 types of the most common WordPress attacks right now, along with ways to protect your site:

1. Brute Force Attacks

The simplest type of attack that targets your password, which could be one of the weakest parts of your security. In a Brute Force Attack, a hacker tries a huge number of possible password combinations over and over until the right one is found.

This kind of attack isn’t very sophisticated, but it works very well against weak passwords and usernames like “123,” “password” and “admin” or password which are the same as your email address.

But a simple attack has a simple way to defend against it. Keep an eye on the WordPress password strength detector and try:

• Long Passwords

• A good mixture of numeric and alphabet characters

• Avoid dictionary words and words relating to your site or company

• Avoid obvious substitutions like “Bed/b@d”

• Add Two-Factor Authentication as an additional layer of security

A generator could help you make a stronger password. Norton Password Generator and LastPass are two popular options: 

 

Alternatively, you can create a password from the WordPress dashboard. In your admin area, simply navigate to Users > All Users and select your profile.

Under Account Management, you can click on Set New Password to generate a password.

 

It’s also a good idea to limit the number of login attempts on your site, using a plugin such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded. This can prevent bots from attacking your login page with thousands of passwords in rapid succession.

A good rule of thumb is that if you seem to be getting a lot of random login requests, you are probably being attacked by brute force – you should check your login credentials and protect your website.

2. WordPress Core Vulnerabilities

WordPress is free and open source, which means that your business can save money and get plenty of chances to come up with new ideas.

Its main advantage – its source code is everywehere available – is on the other side one of its disadvantages: Potential cybercriminals can find easily vulnerabilities in the core code.

One of the easiest ways to leave your WordPress site open to attack is to keep using updated versions of WordPress while also running older versions of PHP, the scripting language that WordPress uses. Luckily, there are developers who find these same exploits and make fixes to keep your WordPress site safe.

Make sure you always have the most recent updates installed to keep your site safe from both new and old threats. Log into your WordPress admin account and navigte to Dashboard >> Updates. Here WordPress will list you all updates which you should consider.

3. SQL Injection Attacks

One of the most common ways to attack WordPress or gain access is by injecting malicious SQL queries or statements to change your MySQL database. This can cause damage or give someone access to your WordPress admin.

An SQL Injection attack could happen in any part of your WordPress site where users can enter information, like a search box or a contact form.

Themes and plugins could be your weak point for SQL Injection attacks, so make sure that anything you install comes from a developer you know and trust.

Since this kind of attack can happen to your MySQL Database software, it’s important to keep up with software updates and never give anyone access to your MySQL credentials.

Changing the default WordPress database name is one of the easiest ways to stop basic hackers. Using a more unique database name will make it much harder for hackers to find your database information and will help keep the back end of your website clean. If you want how to change the WordPress Database Name, you find a comprehensive guide over here.

4. Plugin and Theme Vulnerabilities

Plugins and themes are a great way to add functionality to your WordPress pages or give them a unique look. On the other side Plugins are also frequently target of exploits and WordPress attacks since their strength and weakness rely on their developers. If you are still using an old plugin which has not been updated for a long time this one may become a perfect entry point to attack your WordPress Site. 

This makes it almost mandatory to always keep your plugins up to date. 

Even the free version of the more popular Security Suite Plugins for WordPress (WordFence, Sucurri etc.) nowadays are further scanning automatically for outdated Plugins as well.

If a plugin hasn’t been updated in over 6 months, it’s possible that the person who made it gave up on it. These plugins are most likely to be hacked, so it’s best to not use them at all.

5. Cross Site Scripting

Another very common type of attack that is often called an XSS attack.

An XSS attack is when a cybercriminal uploads malicious JavaScript code without the user knowing. A cybercriminal can either collect data without the user’s knowledge or redirect the visitor to another site.

XSS attacks typically use methods like newsletter subscriptions or forum posts that look like phishing.

The best way to avoid this attack is to make sure that all of your WordPress site’s data validation is done correctly. Validation is an important skill for good security. It basically means checking that all the data on your website matches what you expect it to be.

WordPress has some great ways for developers to clean up data, but for people who are just starting out with scripting, there are a few WordPress XSS plugins that protect against code injections.

6. DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks are one of the most talked about attacks today. They have shut down hospitals, banks, and well-known companies like Netflix, Disney and Amazon all over the world.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack happens when so many requests are sent to a web server that it eventually crashes. DDoS attacks are very well planned, and both small and large websites are targets.

Even though DDoS attacks are often well-hidden and hard to handle, there are many tools that can be used to prevent and stop them.

It’s a strong attack, but you can defend yourself:

• Try disabling exploited API’s during an attack to reduce the number of requests.
• Disable third-party applications which communicate with your WordPress page

• Use security plugins that automatically block IPs which perform suspicious activities

But if you turn on a Website Application Firewall, it can look for suspicious requests and stop them from getting to your website. This can stop an attack. Your hosting provider can also help safeguard your site against DDoS attacks. Some managed WordPress hosting providers provide DDoS mitigation tools as standard.

7. Malware

One of the most common goals of a cyberattacker is to put malware on a user’s device, and because WordPress is so popular, it is a common target.

Cybercriminals who want to upload malware will frequently look for WordPress pages that use old versions because they can take advantage of the vulnerabilities that aren’t protected. Just one more reason to keep up to date.

Wordfence detected well over 70 million malicious files on 1.2 million WordPress sites in the past year. Over 17% of all infected sites had malware from a nulled plugin or theme.

The WP-VCD malware was the most common threat to WordPress, counting for 154,928 or 13% of all infected sites alone in 2020.

Malware attacks are becoming more and more common. Malware can infect your WordPress site in a few different places. 

The most common are: 

Database
This is the part of your website that stores information such as posts and comments. Malware can’t directly attack the website here, so it’s a rare place for infection. But, if it makes its way into your database, it can do a lot of damage. 

Files
The actual code of your files can be infected, especially older ones. This includes  of your website can be infected with malware. This is more common with scripts such as PHP, but it can happen with HTML as well. 

Domains
Just like websites themselves can get infected, so can the domain that they’re on. If the host allows malware on its domains, this is an easy place for hackers to do their damage.

There are different kinds of scanners, such as online scanners and site-level scanners, which differ in where they are installed and what parts of a website they can scan. Not all scanners work well, and there are some that will miss malware completely.

Anti Malware Plugins

Malware can be stopped by using plugins that scan your page and look for malware and other bad code. Some of the best plugins can even get rid of malware and figure out where it came from. 

Our recommendation to secure your site against Malware here is WordFence. WordFence consists of a robust and potential malware scan engine. As an alternative, we can recommend without any doubts Malcare which premium version starts at $99 a year, starting $249 a year is Astra Security plugin.

$199 a year starts Sucuri Security Suite – which also scans Malware very efficiently. Sucuri does further offer an online website to scan your website for malware. Note that the online scanner can only scan the frontend of your site.

Final Thoughts!

Always make sure you have the most recent updates installed, and use a VPN that has the most recent DNS leak prevention, SSL Authentication, and encryption methods to keep your network and devices secure.

Make sure you have a WordPress Backup PlugIn installed that backs up your site regularly. Our recommendation would be Updraft Plus or BackupBuddy – both allow you to back up your WordPress Site easy and reliable. If you want to know how to restore your WordPress Site from a backup in a case of disaster – feel free to read our tutorial How to Restore WordPress from Backup.

Keeping up with security trends is a great way to make sure your WordPress site is safe, and you can always check out our website for information on WordPress trends.