12 Easy Steps to Improve WordPress Site Security – Simple and Clear
12 Steps to follow in order to Mitigate, Restore and Monitor a WordPress Site Under Phishing or Hacking
What is phishing?
Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
What is Hacking?
Simply hacking is a general terms explaining the website that is accessed by a none legitimate person and take control of it either physically or by remote means. Phishing can be the type of hacking. A hacker can do anything when he/she have control of your website.
How is phishing implemented?
Phishing is implemented in numerous ways or methods one of them is website content injections. Foreign contents with decisive WebPages that trick web visitors to leave their valuable information in exchange of bonuses or other reasons like pay fee for expiring online services etc. When a victim visit the URL and fill the information, the attacker will use those details to do the actual crime like entering to PayPal account and draw money from the victim account etc
What to do in Order to Mitigate, Restore and Monitor a WordPress Site Under Phishing or Hacked?
Mitigating the Site
Step #1: Make sure you always use a clean and protected computer to login to the server (malicious cookies, keylodgers, spayware and viruses can snick to the server and feed vital information to the attacker )
Step #2: Backup the database
Step #3: Regular cleaning and optimizing wordpress database, use cpanel or install WP-Optimize By David Anderson, Ruhani Rabin, Team Updraft
Step #4: Change the password to stronger passwords both for database, cpanel and CMS
Step #5: Update all plugins and theme and deleted unwanted ones or the scripts with no updated over six months
Step #6: Secure and prevent editing of php script, web directories and important files like htaccess and wp-config.php files
Step #7: Change login URLs, administrator usernames, database names and usernames to access database plus changing the table prefix to the harder ones
Restoring the site
Step #8: Deleted manually all foreign folders, files suspected for phishing, any useless scripts plus old site backups as those may create loophole to attack the website
Step #9: Remove wp-admin and wp-includes core folders and related wordpress core files in root folder except wp-config.php and htaccess
Step #10: Upload fresh and current copy of the deleted wordpress folder and files wp-admin and wp-includes core folders and wp-config.php and htaccess
Monitoring the Site
Step #11: Install security monitoring and notification systems for file change within your server – recommended plugin for this is Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan by wordfence, there are other very effective script for wordpress to use. Google Search console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) is another wonderful tool for security and Google blacklist removal
Step #12: Make sure your website is visited and scanned regularly for malware (at least once per week) using https://sitecheck.sucuri.net and other effective systems like wordfence, sucuri
Conclusion and Recommendations
CMS are the most affected by cyber attack because of the backend and database where attacker can deploy the security hole found in poorly coded scripts and those which are outdated but still in use by issuing malicious command to the server.
On the other hand, CMS offer robust and professional features, look and feel of the website that match the current market and user demands. The only way to benefit from these advantages is to secure and monitor closely your website.
The website owners are strongly advised to use the experience professional in terms of cyber security and the related phenomena in order to ensure that the issue is correctly mitigated and monitored. Leaving the website to the hands of the inexperienced and novice webmasters may lead to more problems and costs instead of alleviating them.
We at InfoCom Center Limited posses enough experience of more than 10 years dealing with cyber security on CMS websites specifically securing and optimizing WordPress sites. The tips in the article above is the result of such experience and expertise.
We highly urge you to entrust us your website for maintenance and security day to day duties. When the website is on our hand, you will stay victoriously at peace channeling your valuable time and skills to other profitable strategies and activities instead worrying about website of and on everyday. Leave all the hassle work of maintaining and restoring hacked websites to us.
Visit SEO and Website Maintenance Page to learn more about our website maintenance packages