How to Secure Your WordPress Website in 2024 Detailed Tutorial

Again, this generally shouldn’t be used on eCommerce sites or membership sites as they also rely on accessing your site’s back-end. Then create a .htaccess file with the following code and upload it to your /wp-admin/ directory. Server hardening is the key to maintaining a thoroughly-secure WordPress environment. The TimThumb fiasco was a prime example of backdoor vulnerability exploiting shady scripts and outdated software compromising millions of websites. The first step to take is partnering with a good WordPress hosting company.

Your server stores all the files and code that make your website run. In our December 2020 Vulnerability Roundup, we reported on a vulnerability in the Easy WP SMTP plugin. The more potential attackers there are, the higher the risk of exploitation is, and therefore, the Attack Vector score given to the vulnerability will be higher. An RFI or Remote File Inclusion vulnerability allows an attacker to include a file, usually exploiting a “dynamic file inclusion” mechanism implemented in the target application.

4 Intrusion Detection Tools

A DOM-based XSS or Document Object Model-Based Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability occurs when a website’s client-side script writes user-provided data to the Document Object Model (DOM). The website then reads the user data from the DOM and outputs it to the visitor’s web browser. Rule #1 on the OWASP cross-scripting prevention cheat sheet is HTML encoding before adding untrusted data into HTML warmour elements. The attacker uses a URL shortening tool to make the malicious link look non-threatening and very clickable, yourfavesite.com/cool-stuff.

We actively maintain a free WordPress Security Plugin that includes all of the features listed above to enhance security and identify indicators of compromise in your enviroment. Auditing tools give you visibility into user activity on the website. Use carefully isolated FTP and user accounts on Shared Server environments to prevent cross-site contamination. Website hosting security has matured in recent years, and it’s a complex topic. In this section, we’ve listed a number of solutions you can employ on your WordPress website to provide an effective defense in depth strategy. By layering these defensive controls, you’ll be able to identify and mitigate attacks against your website.

Solid Security is part of Solid Suite — The best foundation for WordPress websites.

The availability score is based on the impact to the availability of the exploited software. The Score is highest when the consequence of the impacted component is greatest. The vulnerability scoring system’s equation uses three sets of scores to determine the overall severity score. An XXE or XML External Entity vulnerability allows an attacker to trick an XML parser into passing off sensitive information to an external entity under their control. You can protect against malicious redirects by sanitizing user inputs, validating URLs, and getting visitor confirmation for all offsite redirects.

B. Features and benefits of each plugin

Hackers typically don’t care whether your website is a charity page for homeless puppies or a site with tons of cool merch for sale. Even though the admin’s password for their Gentoo Github account was different than the one used on the compromised account, it was very similar. So this would be like me using “iAmAwesome2020” as a password on one account and “iAmAwesome2021” on another site. If you log into your Google Analytics account and notice a steep decline in website traffic, your WordPress site could be hacked.

However, that helped hackers launch brute-force attacks on WordPress sites more easily, and WordPress tried a new approach. As a result, you now need to create a personalized username when you install WordPress instead. One of the most popular security plugins for WordPress, Sucuri Scanner, can do this for you with ease. The benefit to employing a cloud-based security service like Sucuri is that it provides complete end-to-end website security.

There may be a slight delay in disclosing the vulnerability after the patch is released to give more people time to update for major security vulnerabilities. Our weekly WordPress vulnerability reports cover the publicly disclosed WordPress core, WordPress plugin, and theme vulnerabilities. In these roundups, we share the name of every newly vulnerable plugin or theme, the affected versions, the vulnerability type, its severity, and other relevant information. Phishing is a cyber-attack method using email, social media, text messages, phone calls, and hacked or forged websites to trick the victim into giving up personal information. The attacker will then use the information to access personal accounts or commit identity fraud. The problem with this WordPress security myth is that there isn’t a guy behind a keyboard looking for the perfect combination of theme and WordPress version number to attack.

The next method to improve WordPress security is by using WordPress plugins. To do so, navigate to Settings → General and update the URLs in the WordPress Address and Site Address fields. Since nulled themes are illegal, you won’t get any support from the developers. Incorporate numbers, symbols, and uppercase and lowercase letters into your password.

However, if the authentication check was poorly coded, an attacker could modify the authentication parameter to gain access to the private page. A vulnerability that requires an authenticated user is much harder for a hacker to exploit, especially if it requires admin-level privileges. And, if a hacker already has their hands on a set of admin credentials, they don’t need to exploit a vulnerability to wreak havoc.