In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Thanks Jeff for a great article and a great site. Interesting conversation here so I thought I'd weigh in.

I think the first thing that's important to note is that if you install a plugin on your WordPress site e.g. Akismet, Wordfence, WordPress SEO or any of the other great plugins out there, you're essentially giving them admin access to your site. So worrying that Wordfence or Norton or some other anti-virus product is going to hack you is like giving someone front door keys and worrying they'll break down a wall to get in.

To perform a password audit we double encrypt your data and analyze it on our servers. To put this in perspective, if you're using one of the many backup plugins out there, they take that same data and store it externally but without doing the level of encryption we do. So we really are going above and beyond to keep you and your data secure.

Once we find a weak password we never store the password - instead we just make a note of the password length and first letter and send that back to you securely. We do this so that you know we're not lying about having cracked a password.

Then we clean your data off our servers.

So that's it - super secure and a useful feature.

I'd like to just clarify something else because it really helps you to understand the power of Wordfence Password Auditing: We are telling you not only which 'admin' level passwords are weak, but we're giving you a way to warn your users about weak passwords they use. Of course it's bad practice to use the same password across multiple websites, but unfortunately many users do, especially those with weak passwords. So this feature gives you a way to alert those users that they have a problem with the way they come up with passwords.

The result is that not only will you force them to use a stronger password on your website, but it's quite likely they will use better and unique passwords across the other websites and services they use.

So by installing Wordfence and doing a password audit, you're doing your user community a service.

Regards,

Mark Maunder - Wordfence Founder/CEO.