The digital world never sleeps and is the perfect battleground for hackers attacking websites. Ignoring or not even acknowledging hackers can be a costly and often frightening experience, which has the potential to destroy your digital business or your personal online profile.

To understand the how and why people would instigate an attack on your website, it’s important to unpack several reasons as to why no one is safe unless they are protected and that their WordPress website is updated regularly.

Spreading The Net

Hackers don’t individually sit and look for targets, they cast the net far and wide by using automated tools that look out for potential targets that have security vulnerabilities, which can be weak passwords or software that is outdated.

This can make you, and possibly thousands of others, open to having your website hacked or taken over completely without you even knowing it. While many believe it’s personal or planned, hackers are opportunistic and everyone is a target. Imagine you are sitting in your home, and all your windows, front gate and doors are unlocked and an invisible someone is sitting next to you watching everything you do. Not a pleasant experience is it?

So Why Hack A Website?

A hacker looks at a website that is vulnerable to attacks as the perfect opportunity to get their hands on your digital resources so that they can steal and exploit them for monetary gain. Here are few:

• Your website is backed by a server that they can use to run their own programs.
• Your website is connected to the internet and likely has a squeaky-clean reputation that can help draw in potential victims due to their belief that your website is not blacklisted and must be legit.
• There might be sensitive user data like uploaded files containing client info; user data like passwords and email; CRM or mailing list data, and API keys for third-party services.
• Because your website is reputable and may have a lot of traffic coming to it, it’s the perfect breeding ground for scams and fraudulent schemes. If it looks legit, it must be legit.
• There is a high possibility that your website has some value to you or your company, but most importantly it might have high value to you that does not always pertain to monetary value like a blogging website.

While some may wonder why those are valuable resources; to hackers these are little gold nuggets that can be used to make money … sometimes a lot of money. And they continue to find new creative ways to do so.

No one is safe and just recently in June this year a phishing attack on the UK’s tax department, HM Revenue and Customs, compromised 100,000 UK taxpayer accounts at the cost of £47 million. That’s a lot of money. 

What Is The Hacker’s Endgame?

In essence, your website is online and can be seen by anyone browsing the internet. As defined earlier, your website is not specifically targeted but it is open to threats. If there are any vulnerabilities, hackers focus on breaking through so that they can use your website for profit, data, or full control. Here are the hacker’s core goals:

• Monetary Gain: Top of the list as money talks. Hackers aren’t just playing around and once your website is compromised it could be used to inject ads or malware to generate revenue. It could also be to redirect users to scams or phishing sites. These phishing pages can contain fake login forms that steal sensitive data or are able to mimic people to send fake invoices with the hacker’s bank details. The hackers could also attempt to mine cryptocurrency using your server’s CPU (known as cryptojacking).
• Botnet Recruitment: Your website’s server could be hijacked and added to a botnet — a network of compromised machines used for DDoS attacks, spamming campaigns, and distributing malware.

• Data Harvesting: If your website stores any user information (emails, logins, payment data), hackers may steal user credentials and ultimately access private user data that is highly sensitive.

• Defacing or Vandalism: Not as common but can be highly destructive in our society. This entails defacing your website to make political or ideological statements that spread fake news. But it can also be simply for fun like a graffiti artist defacing a commercial or public space.
• Damaging Your Brand’s Reputation: A compromised website can be blacklisted by Google, harm your SEO rankings and therefore break user trust, which can be extremely harmful to your brand and discourage potential clients.

Prevention Is Better Than Cure

The bottom line is that no website is too small or unimportant. To ensure your website is safe, focus on a combination of proactive measures like strong security protocols, regular updates, and vigilant monitoring. This involves implementing preventative measures like:

• Malware Scanning (regular scans for malicious code or known threats)
• Login Activity Monitoring (failed login attempts, unusual login times or IP addresses and repeated login attempts using known usernames [known as brute-force attacks}).

• File Integrity Monitoring (alerts when unexpected files are added, deleted or modified.

Always use strong passwords and update them regularly and enable two-factor authentication, which can easily avoid major problems in the future that can be financially detrimental. Regularly backing up your website and monitoring for unusual activity are crucial, but also make sure all your plugins and necessary updates to security plugins are up to date so that you avoid hackers targeting your website.

To ensure your website is safe and secure it’s important to follow security standards and always be proactive. You can find out more by visiting the OWASP Top 10 website here.

The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.