Did you know, that people are trying to break into your website basically all the time?<\/p>\n
This comes as a shock to some.<\/p>\n
But, why do they want to do this anyway? Motives vary \u2013 there are indeed plenty of people who think that destroying things is fun. However, the main motive is a predictable one: profit. There\u2019s money to be made.<\/p>\n
This at first seems surprising \u2013 where\u2019s the money to be made in my little blog, someone asks? After all, I don\u2019t make any money from it myself \u2013 how can they?<\/p>\n
Three main ways\u2026<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not your website itself that the average attacker wants \u2013 they want the computer power of the webserver that it\u2019s running on. They want the free electricity. This can be used to perform complex computations such as those used to \u201cmine\u201d digital currencies like Bitcoin \u2013 or simply to hide the hacker\u2019s identity, whilst he uses a server that is not linked to his name, to perform other tasks.<\/p>\n
That computing power can also be used to churn out zillions of spam emails \u2013 again, for free (to the attacker), and in a way that\u2019s hard to trace, since the emails will come from your server, not the attacker\u2019s own computers. Since emails are quick and easy to send, often by the time it is spotted, the attacker has got his pay-off. Spam equals money \u2013 sadly, there are people who don\u2019t immediately delete them, but who reward the evil business model. Website owners and hosting companies get to pay the bills, when the addresses of their servers get black-listed as spam sources, and time has to be invested in cleaning up.<\/p>\n
Another way is to insert links into web pages, to websites selling things \u2013 like various pharmaceuticals. These links may not even be intended or visible for people to click on \u2013 they may be intended only to be visible to search engines, to help the destination websites move up the search rankings. Unscrupulous marketeers can find it much cheaper to buy space on a thousand hacked websites from shady operators, than to build up genuine interest in their products.<\/p>\n
A hacked website can be modified to serve up viruses to its visitors \u2013 catching vulnerable visitors whose own security on their PC\/Mac\/etc. wasn\u2019t up to date. Viruses then allow the visitor\u2019s computer to be used for the same purposes \u2013 and some others. For example, some viruses will encrypt all your files, and decrypt them only upon payment of a ransom \u2013 i.e. \u201cransomware\u201d. Or they may inject new adverts into every web page you visit, making money for either the sellers of advertising space, or the sellers of the advertised products. Or they may log clicks and key-presses on the computer, and capture valuable passwords by this method \u2013 e.g. online banking passwords.<\/p>\n
Sadly, insecure websites are economically valuable. Weak passwords, un-updated plugins, etc., provide ways for the bad guys to use your computing resources, to make money. The costs of breaking in are less than the revenues they can make \u2013 so hacking is a profitable activity.<\/p>\n
Conclusion: don\u2019t say \u201cmy website\u2019s not interesting to hackers \u2013 it\u2019s just small, so I\u2019m fine.\u201d Much hacking is an automated activity. Other hacked websites are running code to try to automate the process of hacking yours, if you\u2019re vulnerable. Everyone\u2019s at risk, and everyone needs to keep on the ball.<\/p>\n
Sadly, even if you follow all the rules, sometimes, hackers find a flaw before the good guys do, and begin taking over websites straight away. When that happens, you need a good backup. With a good backup, you can always recover: without one, you\u2019re really in for a hard time to get back to where you once were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Did you know, that people are trying to break into your website basically all the time? This comes as a shock to some. But, why do they want to do this anyway? Motives vary \u2013 there are indeed plenty of people who think that destroying things is fun. However, the main motive is a predictable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2418,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416\/revisions\/2418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icommunicationsandmarketing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}