Dissecting a WordPress Brute Force Attack

WordPress Brute Force attack

Over the past few months there has been a lot of discussion about WordPress Brute Force attacks. With that discussion has come a lot of speculation as well. What are they doing? Is it a giant WordPress botnet? Is it going to destroy the internet? Well, as you would expect of any good geeks we set out to find a way to find out.

This is not to be exhaustive case study or meant to be a representative sample of what all attacks look like, but it does have similar characteristics to the types of attacks and infections we deal with on a daily basis.

In this post, my goal is to highlight a hack that occurred this weekend, July 20th to be exact, against one of our several honeypots. In this specific instance, it was setup and configured approximately 2 months ago. It had been hacked about a month and a half ago and silly me I forgot to configure what I needed to do real forensics, oops. In any event, everything was cleared and pushed out again to see what happened, it was nothing more than a matter of sitting back and waiting.

Dissecting a WordPress Brute Force Attack | Sucuri Blog