Wordpress is one of the most popular website platform for creating websites and blogs. The reason for its popularity is obviously is the ease of use, maintaining it and also updating content to it. Every popular software, becomes a target of criminals automatically due to widespread use of it and many users actually using it. Brute password discovery and PHP MySql vulnerabilities is often the most popular illegal entry door for criminals looking to break into your blog or website for malicious purposes.
Unfortunately the more popular the software you use, the more people are trying to access it illegally and so it is a double edge sword. In recent times issues with wordpress security has been raised many times. It’s not only the bugs in the wordpress software, but also many other factors like dodgy third party plugins and dodgy themes which have holes or security flaws in it, which often lead to your website getting hacked.
Sometimes it’s just poorly build software or poorly coded plugins that are the weak backdoors into your website or blog. Brute force and dictionary attacks are other kind of headaches that websites like wordpress, joomla and websites often get attacked with. This is because these platforms all have an online login page that is available to anyone on the internet. This feature which is also a admin and user convenience factor for your website members and you, often turns into a liability as well.
Today most of the top blog software’s are built on PHP and MySql databases and so security has to be strong on these both ends, the server and database within your website company servers hosting your website.
One of the most common problems that lead to hacks on your blog or website is lax security or plugins that have not been updated. Sometimes poor coding or server software with holes in it leads to criminal getting access to your blog. Often folders or pages that are not meant to be seen by WebCrawler’s or people online are often laid bare on the internet due to poor configuration errors, which can pose a risk and also serve as an illegal entry point for hackers.
The other most popular weak factor is old software or plugins on your website or blog. Hackers often find new holes in website software or plugins regularly. And it does not take long for people to post exploits on the internet on how to exploit these new found holes in website software or breaches in security.
It is very important to constantly update your software and apply patches, even as new holes are breaches are found in it.
Below I have provided some good wordpress free security programs that do the job of beefing security on your wordpress blog. Most of these plugins have free as well as paid premium versions of their software
Wordfence Security plugin
wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/
Wordfence monitors your website for backdoors, malware and site injections and scans your site for file changes.
Sucuri security plugin
wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner/
This plugins monitors the state of your wordpress security constantly and audits all the activity of your wordpress installation and keeps logs. You can also see who last logged in from which ip into your blog and other logged in information
Bulletproof security
wordpress.org/plugins/bulletproof-security/
These people have been in the game for a while and they have the login security and monitoring. They have included max login attempts and lockout time for dictionary attacks blocking. They also monitor your files for any changes done.
Login Lockdown
wordpress.org/plugins/login-lockdown/
Login LockDown records the IP (internet protocol) address and time of every failed login attempt to your website. If it detects more than a certain number of attempts within a short period of time from the same person or IP’s from the same range, then the login function is disabled temporarily
While just having a good plugin and updated software does not guarantee that no criminal will still break into your website, it surely minimises your chances of being hacked up to a certain extent.
Always keep you blog software and plugins and themes updated regularly and you will always be less of a target to online criminals and hackers.