Hackers. It’s a word meant to make people scared of technology. But, what most don’t know is that there aren’t just bad hackers. There are also people whose, fully legal, profession is hacking or in a less scary way of putting it – penetration testing specialists. These are the people who get paid to discover security vulnerabilities in websites and technology.
So, why is it important to know the difference between a Black Hat (scary) hacker and a White Hat (good) hacker? Simple – White Hat hackers are the ones that find exploits and report them to companies and organizations in order to get them fixed. Black Hat, on the other hand, target exploits and use it for personal monetary gain.
Why do malicious parties hack? Profit. The most common reasons a hacker will target a website is to secretly add SEO Spam, Malicious redirects to order websites, Phishing (trying to trick people to giving personal information), and for use with Spam mailers. These are some of the ways a malicious hacker will use your site if they break in. It all ends up making them money and most of the time, you’ll never even know.
WordPress, which powers over 40% of websites on the internet, is a common target for hackers. WordPress itself is incredibly safe because it is Open Source. There is an entire community of White Hat hackers who constantly test WordPress for exploits. It’s so safe that there hasn’t been a major exploit since 2017. However, the plugins that you may use are what can cause security issues – especially ones that are outdated or feature poor code.
Malicious parties tend to focus on targeting WordPress sites because they expect smaller businesses to have little to no security on their websites. Security, here, does not just refer to passwords. It refers to making sure everything on your WordPress website is always up to date, using plugins that have good code, and monitoring for attempts on your site by bad actors.
Maintaining a WordPress site is a lot of work. You have to constantly be on top of things to ensure your website is safe, but one step you can easily take today is ensuring that you have a strong, unique passwords for your login for your WordPress website.
However, if you need a hand with security, 3PRIME is here to help. We approach web security with a multi-layered approach to make sure that malicious parties have a difficult time attempting to breach your website.