Today, WordPress has recently turn into a common target for malicious hacker attacks. Just during this year, over 170,000 sites and blogs, working on the basis of WordPress have already been hijacked. In 2014 this figure will probably grow. How come this happening, if WordPress is known as to be very safe platform? Let’s take Fix hacked wordpress website at the statistics and determine, whether your WP installation is definitely 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, located on a vulnerable host.
29% of sites were hacked because of WordPress themes vulnerability. In other words, a hacker has identified the weaknesses of theme, installed on WP and deploying it, reached his goal – got usage of the website.
22% of sites were hacked because of the vulnerability of plug-ins, installed on WordPress.
8% web pages were hijacked, because of the weak password to the panel.
What happens during a hacker attack?
If an attacker could gain access to your WordPress blog or website, he’ll likely use the following list of ways to hide his tracks on the site and stay there for just a little longer:
– Creating a new account with administrator privileges;
– Resetting passwords for multiple accounts to prevent other users entering your own 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 very simple, but there are also good news – you can protect yourself from hacking. Looking back and examining the reality, you can understand what to do, to improve the amount of protection for your site from hackers:
– Before you decide on or change providers, it makes sense to gather some information regarding the net hosting provider: browse forums, blogs and articles.
– Before installing a theme or plugin, study them and make sure they are regularly updated official products.
– Delete or rename the administrator account automagically.
– Work with a strong password. Under a solid password, I mean a password that contains at the very 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 utilize 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 will be protected from the most trusted 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 necessary to deal with constantly. The measures, that you are taking now and can take in the future, may influence and will affect the security of your site with no doubts. But do not immediately become discouraged and believe now you must suffer, constantly attempting to secure your webpage, because there is nothing complicated in this process.