WordPress security is becoming a more demanding issue with time. Hackers are aware that many people, specially does without coding knowledge, choose WordPress as their CMS and because it is open source is easy to find backdoors and exploit them to inject malware, trojans or viruses.
One plugin that helps increasing your WordPress site’s security is “Limit Login Attempts”. Its very easy to install and setup and you will not believe the great amount of succesful blocked attempts.
Also, and more important, is to ALWAYS update your WordPress site. Each upgrade will have a notice on why a new version was released. For example the latest one says:
- Fixes a possible denial of service issue in PHP’s XML processing, reported by Nir Goldshlager of the Salesforce.com Product Security Team. Fixed by Michael Adams and Andrew Nacin of the WordPress security team and David Rothstein of the Drupal security team.
- Fixes a possible but unlikely code execution when processing widgets (WordPress is not affected by default), discovered by Alex Concha of the WordPress security team.
- Prevents information disclosure via XML entity attacks in the external GetID3 library, reported by Ivan Novikov of ONSec.
- Adds protections against brute attacks against CSRF tokens, reported by David Tomaschik of the Google Security Team.
- Contains some additional security hardening, like preventing cross-site scripting that could be triggered only by administrators.
Is your responsability to check often and upgrade inmediately to the newest WordPress version. Don’t wait for your website to get hacked!