Addressing WordPress Security Vulnerabilities

WordPress is, by far, one of the most popular open-source CMS platforms holding a 33% piece of the overall share on the internet. This makes WordPress admired by bloggers, fashioners, and entrepreneurs.

But there’s always some vulnerability to the site. By default, it’s a secure platform. One great way to make sure your WordPress site is safe is to learn how to implement security yourself.

That notoriety has the terrible reaction of making WordPress sites a succulent target for malevolent attackers. This compels us to question whether this platform is secure or capable of dealing with attacks.

Site security is something you generally need to keep up or risk a cataclysmic hack.

The first question that arises in our mind is: Is WordPress safe? Well probably yes, but not that much.

WordPress prone to security vulnerabilities and intrinsically not a safe platform for businesses. One reason could be that users are following worst practices or others could be hacking the sites. Consistently, a large number of WordPress sites get hacked, as well as eCommerce sites.

In general, there are no systems that guarantee perfect security. We can only reduce risks but cannot eliminate it.

Now, if we wonder, what makes them hack? And why is security needed?

Before jumping to that question, we need to identify who possible attackers could be.

In general, there are three entities that attack WordPress sites:

Humans: This is an individual sitting at a keyword examining and attacking a site.

A Single Bot: This is a solitary robotized program/script that a programmer is utilizing to assault numerous attacks in a computerized manner.

A Botnet: This is a group of machines running programs that are facilitated from a focal "command and control" server.

What is the purpose of hacking?

The aim is to get full control of your WordPress site (admin control). Then the hacker is able to read all files and databases and make respective changes irrelevant to affect the overall functioning. Reasons could be:

1)    Abstract data: They may steal your customer’s important data like, phone numbers, email address, other essentials, and spam them with malicious emails, identity theft and other data.

2)    Spamvertize: It's like accessing your website and redirecting the traffic to some other malicious or spam sites including their own site. This is often used for spam messages if the site is known to be noxious.

By incorporating your site address in spam messages rather, the messages stay away from spam channels. At that point when somebody who gets spam taps on the connection to your webpage, they are diverted to the malevolent site. This is called 'spamvertizing'.

3)    Attack other sites: When your site has been undermined, a programmer can utilize your webpage to run bot assault contents that hack into different sites. Your site may turn out to be a piece of a bunch of machines called a 'botnet' which is an enormous group of machines utilized for mass malevolent movements.

Website Lockdown

A lockdown highlight for failed login attempts can tackle the gigantic issue of constant attempts. Whenever there is a hacking attempt with redundant wrong passwords, the site gets bolted or locked, and you get informed of this unapproved action.

With WordPress security measures, you can mention a certain number of failed login attempts before the plugin bans the attacker’s IP address.

Update Regularly to Ensure WordPress Security

Each great software product is bolstered by its designers and developers and gets updated once in a while. These updates are intended to fix bugs and now and again have crucial security patches. WordPress, and its modules, plugins are the same.

Not updating them timely can be a threat to hacking. People are generally lazy to update and hackers take advantage of this by exploiting the bugs that have been fixed already.

Fortunately, WordPress naturally turns out updates for its users, so you'll get an email telling you of the update and data on the fixes in your dashboard. For Plugins, you may need to do it manually by going to Plugins on your dashboard.

Secure WordPress Sites Through Themes and Plugins

Themes and plugins are basic elements for any WordPress website. But they are prone to serious security threats. Don’t use the plugin or theme that haven't been updated for a long time, but rather replace it.

When purchasing themes, look only for those that provide ongoing support and updates. The second is if you go for premium themes that come bundled up with 3rd party plugins, they are often not updated timely are vulnerable; purchase them separately for notification of updates.

2 Step Authentication

Presenting a two-factor authentication (2FA) module on the login page is another safety measure. This includes the user’s login essentials for two different segments. The website owner chooses what those two are.

It could be a regular password followed by a secret question, code, a set of characters, or, the Google Authenticator application, which sends a secret code to your cell phone. This way, just the individual with your cellphone can sign in to your site.

Manage Passwords

To keep your website secure, manage your password regularly, improve the strength of passwords with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters. Numerous individuals settle on long passphrases since these are impossible for hackers to anticipate however simpler to recollect than a lot of irregular numbers and letters.

Even there are some managers who take care of managing your passwords. They won't just create safe passwords for you however then store them inside a safe vault, which will spare you the issue of recalling that them.

Wp- Admin Directory

The wp-admin directory is the core of any WordPress site. In the event that any part of your site gets breached, the whole site can get damaged. One potential approach to password protects the wp-admin directory.

With such a WordPress security measure, the Owner may access the dashboard by submitting two passwords. One protects the login page, and the other makes sure about the WordPress admin.

Data Encryption 

Another way to secure your data can be if we implement an SSL certificate. It ensures data transfer between server and users for making it hard to break the connection. It's quite easy to collect an SSL certificate for your website. Third-party companies do provide these and ensure Google rankings of your website.

Remove WordPress Version Number

Version no can be found easily and hackers can use it to plot an attack. The best way is to hide the version number and security plugins, or you can opt for a manual approach by adding a certain function.

Monitor Files and Audits 

You can monitor your files, any changes made to these files through plugins like Wordfence, theme security.

You might come across a situation where you are running WordPress multisite or multi-author website. Through the audit log viewer, you can track who else is making changes to your password, themes, or widget changes that are only meant for admins to access and control.

Others could be installing the WordPress Security Audit Log plugin which provides a full list of activity email notifications and reports. Audit files are mainly to identify or track any changes or malicious activity from one of the users.

Disallow File Editing

One of the methods could be by disallowing file edits, so as nobody gets access to make any changes in a file, even if hackers have the access, they are prohibited to do so. The WordPress dashboard includes all data with plugins and themes; they need to be protected.

This command can be used at the end of wp-config.php

define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);

The more you care about your WordPress security, the harder it gets for a programmer to break in.