Hack Attacks on WordPress that You Need to Know About

With everything switching over to the digital world, more businesses and individuals are looking for a decent online presence. Nothing looks more professional than a website or a personalized blog. However, this has increased the number of hackers who revel in the number of sites they conquer.

Cyber attacks are not new, and any website without proper security can be easily compromised. Website hacking has become such a threat that each week Google blacklists twenty thousand websites for malware and around fifty thousand used for phishing. WordPress is among the many platforms targeted by these malicious hackers and only the concentrated efforts of the best WordPress hosting companies provide some degree of security against the looming threat.

If you are new to the term ‘WordPress’, this is the most popular content management system in the world; it is developed on PHP and MySQL. WordPress has been used to create millions of sites with its thousands of beautiful themes and highly functional plugins.

Many popular websites and blogs are part of the large WordPress community.

Because of its immense popularity websites built on WordPress have been victims of hacking attacks. Over eighteen million WordPress users were compromised during the worst WordPress breach that happened in March 2017. This breach was possible through a WordPress plugin symposium. Not only did WordPress face such a huge blow, but within the same month yet another theme, Unus, was attacked 1,632,627 times exposing even more users.

It is believed that over 39% of all WordPress vulnerabilities are due to cross-site scripting (XSS) while 52% of reported WordPress security vulnerabilities relate to plugins.

As a precaution, users should be wary of the installation of unworthy themes and plugins to avoid creating hacking loopholes. Safety measures such as changing default usernames from admin to a different name and using strong passwords that use different character sets (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols) has been proven to reduce possibilities of a breach.

Most importantly, keeping all plugins and the core WordPress installation up-to-date is essential.

The infographic below, courtesy of websitebuilder.org brings you some of the hack attacks on WordPress you need to know about.

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