Introduction
WordPress is a popular and powerful platform, but its popularity also makes it a target for malicious activities, including malware attacks. Protecting your WordPress site from malware is crucial to ensure the security and integrity of your website and the data it holds. Here are some essential steps to safeguard your WordPress site against malware:
The Different Types of Malware
Before discussing the steps you can take to protect your site, let’s first introduce you to the many types of malware. These are some of the most common malware variations you may encounter:
- Virus: While ‘computer virus’ is commonly used to describe many types of malware, it actually refers to software that replicates itself by inserting its own code into other programs. This can take many shapes, such as adding spam content to your site and infecting your visitors’ computers.
- Trojan horse: A Trojan horse refers to software that pretends to have one function but secretly performs other actions, such as corrupting your WordPress files, ftp files or php files, or exploiting your system’s resources.
- Spyware: This is a program that remains hidden, in order to collect information. This can lead to data breaches and the loss of personal data.
- Ransomware: As the name implies, this is malware that holds you to ransom. Once you’re infected, you will not be able to use your site until you pay the creators to remove it. This can have catastrophic effects, as seen in the WannaCry attack, which shut down several hospitals and radio stations.
- Adware: This malware simply forces you to interact with an advertisement, such as by clicking on it, before you can use your site. This is usually relatively harmless, although irritating and highly undesirable as all it can take is one click.
- Cryptocurrency miners: This is one of the newest types of malware, which infects a site in order to use its resources to mine bitcoins. This can severely slow down your site, and lead to additional security vulnerabilities in the process.
Regularly Backup Your Website
Having a recent backup ensures that you can quickly restore your site if it gets compromised. Regularly back up your WordPress site, and store backups in a secure location.
Action:
- Set up automated backups using plugins or hosting services.
- Store backups on a secure external server or cloud storage.
4 Ways to Protect Your WordPress Site Against Malware
1. Keep WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins Updated
Action
- Enable automatic updates for WordPress core.
- Regularly check for updates and apply them promptly.
2. Use Strong Login Credentials
Weak usernames and passwords are easy targets for attackers. Ensure that you and your users use strong, unique passwords. Consider using a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
Action:
- Enforce strong password policies.
- Use a reputable password manager to generate and store complex passwords.
3. Secure Your Login Page
WordPress doesn’t have many weak points, but one of the most prominent is your site’s login page. This isn’t actually a fault of WordPress itself. Instead, your wp-login page is a target because most attackers will focus their efforts there, to try and gain access to your site in order to infect it with malware. As such, it’s important to understand how you can strengthen your login page to prevent such attacks.
We’ve previously talked about how you can protect your wp-login page, but let’s quickly go over the basics. The two most important things you can do are very simple: choosing a strong username and password. You should always avoid using ‘admin’ as your username, as this is the most common option and thus is easy for hackers and bots to guess. You also need to use a strong password, which you can generate within WordPress itself.
In addition, you may want to go even further by implementing two-factor authentication, which means users will require a mobile device to log in. You can also use a plugin like Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, to stop users from being able to make endless attempts to break into your account.
4. Install a Security Plugin
Security plugins provide an additional layer of protection by monitoring and blocking suspicious activities. Choose a reputable security plugin that includes features like firewall protection, malware scanning, and login attempt monitoring.
We’ve already touched on several plugins that can protect specific aspects of your site. However, there are also a number of plugins that provide a complete security system for your WordPress site. In fact, there are so many that we can scarcely name even a fraction of them here. Instead, let’s take a quick look at some of the most popular options.
First up, we’ve got Sucuri Security, which is a free plugin that offers a lot of features:
Among other things, Sucuri scans your site for malware and keeps itself up-to-date on the latest threats. It will send you notifications about any security issues, and monitors all of your site’s files to spot anything that’s potentially harmful.
Next up is Wordfence Security:
Learn more about Steps to take when your site is hacked.