We all know that there is a lot of malicious activity on the web and we all want to keep our websites safe from it. We use Wordfence security on all the websites that we build (and it has worked really well). Earlier this week, the team at Wordfence blogged about the latest brute force attack that happened, and is still happening, this week.
A brute-force attack is an attempt to discover a password by systematically trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols until you discover the one correct combination that works. An attacker can always discover a password through a brute-force attack, but the downside is that it could take years to find it. Depending on the password’s length and complexity, there could be trillions of possible combinations.
The number involved in this week’s attack are astonishing. At its peak, 14.1 million attacks were taking place per hour with over 190,000 WordPress sites being targeted.
What you need to do is to make sure that you have very strong passwords on your site, especially if you use an admin account. It’s always good practice to delete any accounts that you don’t use as that reduces the number of points that can be attacked.
Please give us a shout if you need any help. It’s a scary place out there but we can be prepared for it.