How Jetpack Helps You To Protect Against Brute Force Attack

WordPress has provided a great start to many business ventures in setting up their business websites and also to the youth to start their own blog for free. WordPress development is rapidly increasing day by day as many companies have started hosting their websites on this platform. Many free and excellent features have been provided by WordPress in building the websites and many additional features can be installed as per the requirement of the user.

Today, security is a major concern for the website owners as hacking is increasing day by day. Every website owner wants to secure its website against these hackers. Now, it has become our responsibility to secure the confidential data of our website against the malicious acts of the intruders. The user database should be secured in a strong manner and high investment should be done to safeguard the data against the hacking activities. Nowadays, brute force attacks are very common among the attackers. Brute force attack is one of the oldest attack done by hackers and is a very popular attack to gain access to the user account. The hacker tries to run a script that contains a combination of dictionary words to match the user’s username and password. Based on the complexity of the user’s password, the brute force attack will take time to crack the password. If the password is simple, then it can be accomplished within 1 hour and if it a strong password containing multiple combinations of alphabets, numbers and special symbols, then it may take one or two days also. The length and complexity of the password matters in case of a brute force attack. This attack puts the user data at high risk as the hackers might modify the data or insert some garbage data.

WordPress allows the user to keep the username as admin by default. The user must change the username from admin to anything else as soon as possible as the attackers are always ready to attack the account whenever they find any loophole and the default username is too weak to sustain the brute force attack. So, it is in the favor of the user to change the username from admin to something that is strong enough to defend the attack. Also, WordPress allows unlimited login tries and this will encourage the hackers to take chance to enter the account by brute force attack.

Now, the good part is that to save us from the brute force attack, the WordPress development team has facilitated us with a plugin called Jetpack for free. Install Jetpack plugin and it will start its work of protecting your WordPress site from unauthorized access. Jetpack automatically blocks malicious IPs before they reach your WordPress site. It also counts the total attacks that are done on the site and keeps a record of it. The WordPress development team has provided Jetpack with the facility of whitelisting known IPs to prevent false positives. You can turn on or off the feature from the dashboard with one click. This plugin prevents the site from going slow with repeated malicious attacks occurring on the server.

Jetpack plugin allows tons of modules and features apart from protecting the site from a brute force attack. Once you install the Jetpack plugin, you can enable the Protect module to protect the site from brute force attack. The dashboard will show you the exact number of malicious attempts that have been made on your site once you have enabled the Protect module. To whitelist specific IP, go to Jetpack -> Settings -> Protect -> Configure. You will receive a blank box where you can write all the IPs that you want to whitelist. Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are allowed and you can also specify a range of IP addresses by entering the lower IP address and higher IP address and separating them with a dash. To provide higher security to the user’s website against automated robots, the WordPress development team decided to avoid single level captchas. So now, WordPress have set up multi-level captchas and that also will be enabled only when the system is at high risk and not every time as done by the other captcha providers.

The WordPress development team does constant efforts to find the loopholes and vulnerabilities in the plugins and themes being developed and they try to release the new updates to keep the user’s websites clean and bug-free. Jetpack has provided us with Manage to clean our interface and managing the plugins by automatically updating them to avoid the vulnerabilities.

Another facility used to prevent the brute force attack is the Limit Login Attempts. This helps the admin to limit the number of login attempts and the IPs which are trying to brute force the login page are automatically blacklisted. This feature has the extra advantage as it informs the user about the remaining tries that can be made before the system will be locked out. The other features of this plugin are handling the server behind a reverse proxy and optional logging.

Conclusion

In today’s digital world, the importance of business data is increasing day by day and so is the risk to handle this data with care. Now, it has become mandatory for every business entity to take steps to safeguard their private data before any intruder comes and damages it. The WordPress development team is constantly making sincere efforts to introduce new and better plugins that can provide us with excellent features to protect our account from malicious attacks. The website owners planning to safeguard their website against brute force attack must take action immediately by installing Jetpack and start availing its services. Jetpack is one of the cool plugin developed by the WordPress development team which is why so many WordPress site owners and bloggers have started installing it and using its features to secure their account. You also don’t wait and grab this chance of protecting your WordPress site against brute force attacks with Jetpack.

Author Bio

Harshal Shah has countless experiences as being a CEO of Elsner Technologies PVT. LTD: WordPress Development Company that offers various web development services to clients across the globe. Mr. Harshal is a huge tech enthusiastic person who has written major & genuine articles as well as blogs on motley topics relevant to various CMS platforms. This can guide the readers to acknowledge new practices about web development and also they can learn new ideas to build & optimize a website online using multiple web development tools & techniques.