Hardening wordpress website

Hardening WordPress Website

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Vulnerabilities in WordPress

Like many modern software packages, WordPress is updated regularly to address new security issues that may arise. Improving software security is always an ongoing concern, and to that end you should always keep up to date with the latest version of WordPress. Older versions of WordPress are not maintained with security updates.

Passwords

Many potential vulnerabilities can be avoided with good security habits. A strong password is an important aspect of this.

The goal with your password is to make it hard for other people to guess and hard for a brute force attack to succeed. Many automatic password generators are available that can be used to create secure passwords.

Securing wp-admin

Adding server-side password protection (such as BasicAuth) to /wp-admin/ adds a second layer of protection around your blog's admin area, the login screen, and your files. This forces an attacker or bot to attack this second layer of protection instead of your actual admin files. Many WordPress attacks are carried out autonomously by malicious software bots. One of the application you can use is latch. For more information on this application you can visit https://latch.elevenpaths.com/, its not only for your WordPress website but can also be used for others too.

Make use of following plugins:

Bulletproof security --> to create strong .htaccess file

Anti-Malware --> to scan the malicious files in the domain

ip blacklist --> to blacklist the ip which tries to do brute force attack

Generate the salt from following link and paste it in wp-config.php file

http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

Summarizing:

1. Making sure your WordPress installation has the latest updates

2. Minimizing the number of plugins you use (and deleting the ones you don’t)

3. Choosing passwords that are difficult to crack

4. Performing regular data backups

5. Protecting your WordPress using .htaccess

For more information please visit following links

http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

http://www.firedaemon.com/blog/wordpress-hardening-guide

http://thematosoup.com/wordpress-security-htaccess/