7/17/2017 Is Your Website At Risk Of Being Hacked?How Secure Is Your Website?You may be the owner of a small business with a small website and think your website isn't a target for hackers. After all, what would a hacker want with your website? Your website might be just about your services that doesn't contain any customer information. Why would a hacker even bother with your "little" site? You might be surprised about what hackers can do with your site once they infiltrate it and what they can do.
We are sticklers about website security. We have also taken on customers that have had their site hacked. It's no fun. Every site that we have dealt with that has been hacked did not have any person's personal information whatsoever. So why did the hackers bother with these sites? If you are using our favorite CMS - WordPress, it's really very simple. It's all about the numbers. As of last year (2016), WordPress websites accounted for around 26% of the websites on the web. So with over a Billion sites on the web that equates to around 250 million of them being on WordPress. It's a numbers game for hackers, why not create one bot that can have the most effect and best chances of succeeding. What Will Hackers Do With Your Site?What does a hacker want with your site? Install malware to try and infect visitors computers, try and spread their political views, try and gain access to the server your site is hosted on, and probably sometimes, some geek with too much time on their hands. So how do these hackers get into your site in the first place? A rather large list was made on WPMUDEV.org recently that has some of the most used techniques:
That's not even the entire list from the post, nor is the post every way that a site can be hacked. As time goes on, hackers get more sophisticated and develop new ways to get into sites to use them as they wish. How To Keep Your Site SecureBefore you get into a full on panic, there are things you can do to help make sure your site doesn't fall victim to hackers. The first thing you can do is make sure you use strong usernames and passwords. Never, and we mean never, use the default "Admin". Use very long passwords, maybe a snippet from your favorite song and add a few punctuation marks and numbers before and after. The second thing and probably the most effective is....... KEEP YOUR SITE UPDATED! Whenever there is a new release of WordPress, make sure you install it right away. Whenever you receive an email that an update is available, get it done. But it doesn't stop there, you also need to make sure that your Themes and Plugins are also kept up to date because they can be just as vulnerable. A classic example of this is the vulnerability in the Revolution Slider back in 2014 where as many as 100 thousand sites were hacked. You won't receive email notifications for these types of updates, so we suggest checking at least weekly that everything is up to date. Gail Gardner just posted an article today on another one of our top priorities of keeping your site secure with the importance of choosing a good server or hosting provider:
Gail also makes some good points in her article about you company's security policy with employees that have access to your site. Lastly, we want to point out that you should be making backups regularly. Why? Because if your site does get hacked, restoring your site to it's previous condition will be a whole lot easier. Wrap UpWhile you might consider your site not large enough, or have important data that hackers may want, it's still a target. The most important and effective ways of keeping hackers out is to choose a good host, and keeping your site up date to help minimize the risks of your site falling prey. And in case it does fall victim, make sure you have backups! To learn more about how we help keep our customers sites secure, as well as our web design services, visit our site MD Internet Marketing Solutions Is Your Website At Risk Of Being Hacked? was via Blogger Is Your Website At Risk Of Being Hacked? Comments are closed.
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