A single hacker MuhmadEmad defaced 966,000 WordPress web pages with political propaganda.
You can see some of them by googling ‘hacked by muhmademad’.
Of course website owners have been removing the graffiti, but the question remains – is WordPress safe?
Read on if you want to find out:
- The chances of your Wordpress website being hacked – just how much at risk are you?
- The seven dangers of being hacked and potential disasters for your business.
- Three things you must do to keep your website, your business and your livelihood safe.
Just How Bad Is It?
Successful hacking and malware attacks have increased massively, trebling in four years.
WordPress websites are being breached at an alarming rate.
89% of attacks are for money or espionage.
Most attacks are automated. Hackers write software that bombards websites and then hide their identity by faking their IP addresses or launching attacks from their victim’s websites.
It’s common for WordPress websites to suffer thousands of attacks per hour. If this was happening to your website, would you even know?
7 Dangers of WordPress Hacking
Hacking’s no joke. If you’re the kind of person who buys insurance, yet you haven’t yet invested in WordPress website security to protect your website, then it’s time to act.
This is what a hacker can do to you and it isn’t pretty. In fact, it could put you at serious financial risk:
- A hacker can encrypt your website and demand a ransom to return it. Some businesses have forked out tens of thousands of dollars to get their website back.
- A terrorist could put propaganda on your pages. What does that do for your brand or your reputation?
- A hacker could place Google ads for online casinos into your content, or links to Garcinia Cambogia and Italian leather handbags! You end up looking scummy!
- Malware could infect your website and then springboard from your website to other people’s websites or computers. Google and the spam authorities could blacklist your domain name, website and email addresses!
- Hackers can steal your data. This could include customers’ personal details, passwords, credit card numbers, confidential documents and private messages, to name but a few!
- Your page content can be wrecked, causing hours of downtime and wasted staff time.
- You can lose your website, costing you in lost business and forcing you to create another website.
Are You Safe?
The biggest problem with WordPress website security is that most people don’t use it! They do absolutely nothing to prevent their WordPress website from hackers.
Do you lock your doors when you leave home?
I bet you do!
Yet most people leave the door to their WordPress website wide open, putting their business and livelihood at stake.
Webhive has always provided the highest standards of web security for our website “Club71” and as a result, we have not experienced any hacking or viral intrusion on our site. Webhive has always updated and alerted us to any impending concerns, alerting us of necessary upgrades or modifications. I cannot speak more highly of Jackie and the Webhive services. Excellent knowledge, customer service and web-security.
Garry Henshall
Web administrator – Club71
club71.org.au
Should I Abandon WordPress?
Abandoning WordPress because of the dangers of getting hacked is like abandoning your house because you don’t want to install deadlocks.
If you don’t secure your WordPress website, chances are that sooner or later you’ll get hacked.
WordPress websites are a great target for hackers because so few people do anything to protect them.
You lock your car…
You lock your house…
Lock your website!
Three Things You Must Do to Keep Your Website, Your Business and Your Livelihood Safe
If you’re not doing the following, your website’s an open target:
- Applying updates immediately. The WordPress core, plugins and themes are constantly being updated to fix security problems and to keep up-to-date with new devices and other software. If you don’t update your website, you’re leaving it open to known vulnerabilities. Hackers run software that uses these vulnerabilities to break into websites.
- Running automatic backups and storing them off-site. Your backups should run regularly and be kept in a different location separate to your hosting account. Then, if your hosting account is broken into you can still recover your website.
- Using good quality, secure hosting. A hacked hosting account gives full access to your website. The cheaper your hosting, the less likely it is to be secure, so invest in good hosting.
These three actions are a bare minimum.
Thank you for many years of support with my websites Jackie. In the entire time I have been working with you I’ve had no security breaches and I admire your prompt, effective responses in dealing with me.
regards
Dr. Rod Paddick
We Learnt the Hard Way!
When we first started working with WordPress, we installed a plugin that inserted ads for online gambling on people’s websites!
Several years later, we now know which plugins are likely to be safe!
We’ve spend many hours reading security logs and warnings to learn which parts of a website or hosting account get attacked.
We must be doing okay because this is what our clients say:
Jackie Stallard from Webhive has provided a brilliant and safe website service for many years for our business, we couldn’t be happier and we certainly recommended the Webhive team to any body, its security and safety is 10/10.
Regards,
Brett Kuhne
Food and Event
Let Us Solve Your Security Headaches
You could set up your WordPress security yourself but let’s face it, it’s complicated.
You need to understand how to:
- Set file permissions
- Add .htaccess directives
- Decide which plugins are safe
- Set up off-site backups
- Run automatic updates
- Install a firewall and choose what to allow and what to deny
How Much Can You Afford to Lose?
We recommend selecting your security level based on the value of your website. If your website is a hobby, by all means leave it open to hackers. But if your business depends on your website, act now! Our WordPress hosting is secured. If you already have a good hosting provider, ask us to check that your website is secure.