Website hacking is spreading like fire in a forest. Hackers are now carrying out sophisticated operations within the close-knit web hacking community. Cyber-attacks not only compromise your information but also all the data on your site, including your customer’s data. Inc.com reports that almost 60% of small businesses, which are hacked, go bankrupt within 6 months. This is alarmingly dangerous. Apart from this, hacking can hurt your business in numerous other ways:
- You or any of your customers can be victims of identity theft.
- The speed of your website slows down.
- Your website can completely crash.
- Your company’s reputation can take a big hit.
- You can lose your customers.
As it is said, “Precaution is better than cure.” Before anything like this happens, you should take steps to secure your WordPress site. There can be many reasons due to which your site’s security is compromised. It can be a particular theme, plugin, weak passwords, missing security updates, social engineering, data leaks, etc.
Being the most widely used CMS platform across the globe, WordPress is a popular target for data breaches, hacking attempts, malware, and Trojans attacks. Stats show that 8% of WordPress websites are hacked due to weak passwords.
Therefore, it’s important to use complex passwords to ensure your website is not vulnerable. According to a report by Sucuri, 61% of infected WordPress websites were out of date.
And as per WP White Security, 30.95% of Alexa’s top 1 million websites are using the outdated version 3.6 of WordPress, making them vulnerable to hacking attempts. You must ensure your site is using the latest WordPress version. It will allow you to fix any bugs and keep your website secure.
According to WPScan, 52% of WordPress vulnerabilities are due to WordPress Plugins. And in one study, it was reported that 4000 websites were infected by malware due to a fake SEO plugin.
Before installing any plugin, you must ensure it’s from a reliable source, compatible with the latest WordPress version and up to date.
According to WordFence, there are almost 90,000 attacks per minute on WordPress websites. In one study, it was found there are 3,972 known WordPress vulnerabilities. Out of which, 52% are from WordPress plugins, 37% are due to core WordPress files & 11% are from WordPress Themes.
Other attack vectors include:
- Database Injections
- Upload Exploitation
- Cross-Site Request
- Authentication Bypass
- Denial of Service
- Full Path Disclosure
According to Website Builder, Google blacklists 70,000 websites due to security issues every week. From the blacklisted sites, 50,000 are guilty of phishing while the rest are for malware issues. You might be surprised that The Panama Paper Leak, in which 4.8 million emails were exploited, was due to WordPress Plugin vulnerability. The most common malware infections on WordPress are Backdoors, Drive-by downloads, Pharma hacks & Malicious redirects.