As a large hosting provider we use a lot of different applications, and we try to keep them all as secure as possible. Unfortunately, we can only win so many battles at any given time, and we do require help from you, the customer at times to ensure your system is safe. Wordpress, as great as it might be as a blogging platform, seems to find itself getting hacked more than most applications that we host. Now, I’m not saying that Wordpress is a bad application by any means, but with it being such a large platform it draws a lot of unwanted attention.

As such, there are quite a few hackers and script kiddies out there that will try to compromise your Wordpress based website. We’re hoping that with this article we can further educate Wordpress users on how to protect their sites. Here’s a few helpful tips we can provide, some of which you can have us do, and some things we’ll recommend that you do:

5. Please, please, please don’t use a user name of ‘admin’! I know that’s the Wordpress default, and it’s just easy to use it, but what user name do you think is in every brute force attack? You guessed it, ‘admin’. We’d recommend using a unique user name for administration purposes, like ‘mark.rogers’, or ‘mrogers’. Of course, you can use your own name if you don’t like mine I suppose.

4. Remove the Wordpress version number from any headers, footers, css, etc, etc. Leaving the version number in your page source is a dead giveaway to would be vandals to dig through google to find ways to exploit your specific version. Granted this is the equivalent of leaving your lights on at home while you’re away, but if it deters someone, then consider it a victory! It’s just too easy to use the version number to find exploits for your site, as Wordpress exploits become public knowledge too often.

3.Let us put basic Apache authorization on the /wp-admin section of your blog! We’d be more than happy to do it, and it’ll make every php file in the /wp-admin path even harder to get to. Granted it can be a bit of a nuisance to double login, but not nearly as big of a nuisance as restoring from that backup you took last week right? We can also limit access to the wp-content, and wp-includes directories as well. Plus we can lock it down by IP, or user name/password combos.

2. I know it should go without saying, but please choose hard, random passwords. I know a lot of blogs, my own included, started off really small, and I never worried about getting hacked. My blog never got big, but maybe yours will! Either way, play it safe, and go with a hard password from the get go. That way if your little playground gets bigger one day, or if you land on Digg by accident, you’ll be at least somewhat prepared.

1. While the above options are great for helping secure your instance of Wordpress, there’s one piece of the puzzle that is probably the most important. That piece? Keep Wordpress up to date at all costs! There isn’t an option that can replace this critical piece, because Wordpress being the giant of blogging that it is, is constantly being updated to fix security flaws. Staying up to date is a way of staying ahead of the game, and it’s generally a ten minute ordeal that we’ll take care of for you if you’re a customer of ours! Look at it this way, if you’re running a year old version of Wordpress then you’ve given vandals a year to figure out how to hack you. Why give them that edge? Most Wordpress upgrades are painless, and you know we’ll gladly work with you to schedule it for a time that’s best for your company’s needs as well.

Hopefully this helps answer some question on how to protect yourself from would-be hackers in regards to Wordpress. The fun part is that this applies to quite a few PHP applications in a general sense. Drupal, Simple Machine Forums, and so on can all benefit from these security tips, especially security tip #1! As always customers, drop us a line at support@contegix.com with any question you might have.