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Some experiences with the last world-wide WordPress brute force attack

As you most probably know, this website uses WordPress. Last Saturday, trying to access the site admin area I was faced with an error generated by too many redirects.
error_redirects
Having other things to do, I ignored it for that moment. Later a friend of mine published on his website some information about an existing world-wide brute force attack over WordPress websites and then I started reading more information about this issue.

My Firefox’s Web Console has thrown such messages:

[13:38:30.162] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 834ms]
[13:38:30.998] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 403ms]
[13:38:31.405] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 580ms]
[13:38:31.990] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 558ms]
[13:38:32.558] GET http://my_site.ro/wp-admin/ [HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily 553ms]

Most probably I was also one target for that attack.

Having a strong password and not using admin user the effective website was not affected otherwise than in wp-admin area. I contacted my website hosting provider and after some emails exchange, I was able to login into wp-admin area. First thing I did was to install and activate Limit Login Attempts plugin and the results didn’t expect too much to appear.
Today morning, this plugin sent me an interesting email.
results_of_limiting_login_attempts

So an attempt of brute force attack is cut.

In order to avoid any such unpleased issues it is strongly recommended following few basic steps:

  • Avoid using default users (ex. admin) having high privileges.
  • Use strong passwords that contain special characters also in order avoid dictionary attacks used by brute force methods. You can check if the password it’s strong enough using online free tools such passwordmeter.com or Password Checker.
  • Install and activate a tool such Limit Login Attempts.
  • Enjoy your life. 🙂

Silviu Ardelean

Software Engineer

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