Since this spring, the world’s WordPress sites have seen a surge of brute-force hacking attempts, where scripts running from “botnets” have been steadily trying one dictionary word after another in an attempt to take over their victim sites.

I was alarmed to discover this traffic hitting my website earlier this week and was stymied as to how to prevent it. Normally when one gets a hacking attempt, it’s a simple thing to block that site’s IP address using firewall rules. In this case, however, the attackers are using a massive array of hacked computers scattered around the world. Each hack attempt comes from a different IP address, making it impractical to block them all.

Wondering if my site would soon fall to these script kiddies, I took some time to configure some analysis tools to get a better idea of what I was facing.

I needn’t have worried. This is what these genius password attempts look like:
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