Today, WordPress has already become a common target for malicious hacker attacks. Just in this year, over 170,000 sites and blogs, working on the foundation of WordPress have been hijacked. In 2014 this figure will probably grow. Why is this happening, if WordPress is considered to be very safe platform? Let’s take a look at the statistics and determine, whether your WP installation could be the next target for hackers.
Learn on others’ mistakes!
41% of sites were hacked through the fault of hosting providers. Because of this an attacker has used the vulnerability of hosting in his own interests, or used security hole at hosting provider to hack WordPress blogs, situated on a vulnerable host.
29% of sites were hacked due to WordPress themes vulnerability. Put simply, a hacker has identified the weaknesses of theme, installed on WP and deploying it, reached his goal – got access to the website.
22% of sites were hacked due to vulnerability of plug-ins, installed on WordPress.
8% webpages were hijacked, due to weak password to the panel.
What happens throughout a hacker attack?
If an attacker could gain access to your WordPress blog or website, he will likely use the following list of techniques to hide his tracks on the webpage and stay there for a little longer:
– Developing a new account with administrator privileges;
– Resetting passwords for multiple accounts to prevent other users entering your personal WP site;
– Changing the role of the prevailing inactive account;
– Injecting malicious code in to the content;
– Modifying WordPress files, to re-gain access to the system via malicious code (such as a backdoor);
– Creating redirects in .htaccess files.
How to protect WordPress from hacker attacks?
As you can plainly see, to hack WordPress site is simple, but there are also good news – it is possible to protect yourself from hacking. Looking back and examining the facts, you can know very well what to do, to raise the amount of protection for the site from hackers:
– Before you decide on or change providers, it makes sense to gather some information about the net hosting provider: browse forums, blogs and articles.
– Before installing Repair hacked wordpress website or plugin, study them and make sure they are regularly updated official products.
– Delete or rename the administrator account automagically.
– Use a strong password. Under a solid password, After all a password that contains at least 8 characters, which do not form any word and isn’t a nickname of one’s dog. The password also needs to contain lowercase and uppercase, numbers, and special characters such as for example!, &,?
– Keep your themes, plugins along with other software up-to-date and always use fresh patches to protect your software from its suppliers.
– If you use the aforementioned tips, the security of your WordPress will largely increase, and it’ll be protected from probably the most widely used and known attacks.
Don’t stop! Keep further your WordPress theme security level!
You can’t take one-time measures to improve WordPress safety and stop at this, just because a site’s security is essential to cope with constantly. The measures, that you are taking now and can take in the near future, may influence and will affect the security of one’s site without doubts. But do not immediately become discouraged and think that now you have to suffer, constantly attempting to secure your webpage, because there is nothing complicated in this process.
