After hacking into your website, they can do all sorts of things, such as adding malicious ads, straiting your users, and even taking them down. This tutorial will show you how to stop and prevent brute force attacks so that hackers have no chance to break into your site.
But before we move on to the steps, let’s clarify what a brute force attack is so you have a better understanding during the tutorial.
What is a brute force attack?
When we say that hackers try different combinations of passwords on their website to log in, you must be imagining a real person sitting on a computer and typing in passwords, right? Hackers are far more advanced than that. They program bots to scan the Internet and find websites running in WordPress. Then they target the login page, costa rica phone number data which is usually www.example.com/wp-admin.When they are on the login page, these bots run a huge database of commonly used usernames and passwords.
These hacking bots are capable of executing thousands of login attempts per minute. And they keep trying several times until they get their database fixed or exhausted. Hence the name attack of “brute force”. Now you may be thinking that just set a really strong password and the problem will be solved. But that is not enough.
Thousands of login attempts can slow down your site and even make it crash. This can disrupt the user experience, which means that visitors will leave the site because they won’t load fast enough.
A better way to protect your site would be to prevent the hacker from making these attempts. This is what we will show you how to do next. Let’s delve deeper into the subject.
How to Stop Brute Force Attacks on WordPress
Below, we will detail 6 important steps you need to follow to protect your site from hackers. We will focus on preventing brute force attacks, moosend works well for e-commerce brands but remember that these steps will also help to prevent other malware attacks.
You will be creating a robust security system that ensures that hackers have no way to damage your site inside or out.
Step 1: Install a firewall plug-in
A firewall serves as your first line of defense. It will review all visitors who come to your site and block malicious bots. There are two types of site firewalls that you can use.
- Web app firewall: These firewalls stand in front of your WordPress site to check out the traffic coming in. They are quite effective, but do not offer protection at the server level. This means that hackers can still attack your server and damage your website.
- DNS-level website firewall: This firewall offers better protection against hackers because it’s in front of your server. Therefore, global seo work it will examine all traffic before it reaches the main server of your site.
We highly recommend investing in a DNS firewall to protect your site. Sucuri has one of the best DNS firewalls in the industry.
Sucuri comes with built-in features to block brute force attacks without affecting users of your site, as well as blocking automated tools used to scan your site. This helps keep your site off the radar of any attacker.
In addition, it constantly monitors your site, so that if some malicious bot arrives at your site, it will be automatically blocked.
If you want to know more details, read our analysis of Sucuri.
Step 2: Limit login attempts
If you want to specifically block brute force attacks, one of the best ways to do this is to limit the number of attempts a user has to log in.
Thus, for example, you can grant them a maximum of 3 attempts to enter the correct username and password. If he can’t, he can use the “Lost your password” option and recover his credentials.
Any user or bot who tries to make brute force on your site will give up after three attempts and move on to the next target.
You can add a limit plugin of login attempts on your WordPress site to add this feature. If you are using a security plugin like Sucuri, you should already have the limit of login attempts automatically added to your site.
Step 2: Restrict access to login page
Another great way to protect your site from brute force attacks is to grant access to the login page URL only to people of your trust.
Each device that uses the Internet has a unique IP address. You can use a security plug-in to universally block access of all IP addresses to the login page and put in the only those you want. This way, only authorized users can open the login page. This method is called a and is very effective for keeping hackers away. If you are using Sucuri, on the Access Control tab of your dashboard, you can add IP addresses from the .
Security (Segurança You will see an option to enable ‘Admin panel restricted to only IP addresses’. By checking this box, Sucuri will automatically allow only its trusted users to access the login page.
Step 4: Exhibit passwords regularly
Needless to say, the best way to protect any account or website on the Internet is to use strong usernames and passwords.
You also need to change your password regularly. If you suspect an attack, you need to change it immediately. Now, if you have multiple users with access to wp-admin, they may not remember to change their passwords regularly.
To overcome this, you can set reminders and force them to reset the password at intervals.
You can use a plug-in like Expire User Passwords to help you expire passwords periodically, forcing the user to change the password before being able to log in again.