WordPress Security: An Introduction to Hardening WordPress
How many times have you walked out the front door of your house for just a few minutes and not bothered to lock the front door? Probably on more than one occasion, right? What about leaving your car unlocked for just a few minutes — seriously, who’s going to steal your car on a cold rainy morning while you take 2 minutes to grab a hot cup of coffee? Hardening WordPress
It’s human nature. We rarely worry about managing a potential risk until it’s too late. Once someone breaks into your house, steals your car, or hacks into your WordPress website, then you start to worry.
The problem with all these scenarios is that by the time it happens, it’s too late. You’re left picking up the pieces, cleaning up the mess, and trying to minimize the damage. With just a little bit of planning and prevention, there is a good chance you could have averted the entire situation.
Obviously, this post isn’t about your car or your house, it’s about your WordPress website and the steps you can take to minimize your potential vulnerabilities. The thing is, security begins with having the right attitude. It’s an attitude where prevention and management are at the forefront – not crossing your fingers and hoping that it never happens — because it’s not a case of if your website gets hacked, but when.
Having your website hacked can be anything from a minor headache for a casual blogger, to a major security lapse for a well-established business. If you’re dealing with any kind of private or sensitive information on behalf of customers, a security breach could potentially be devastating to both you and your customers.
WordPress security is a complicated topic, no doubt. This guide should help you navigate through some of the most important issues. The end result being an overall better understanding of how you can manage the risks associated with building a WordPress website — the world’s most popular content management system.
The first step to implementing better security practices comes with understanding and being able to assess the risks you’re facing.
The Truth About WordPress Security Risks
According to W3Techs, use of the WordPress CMS platform accounts for more than 25% of websites worldwide. It’s this figure alone that makes WordPress such a popular target for hackers. Quite simply, there are lots of potential victims to pick from.
The popularity of WordPress has also resulted in an ecosystem that contains over 42,000 plugins — with each one having the potential to open up additional vulnerabilities. And we haven’t even factored in the plugins that are not available from within the WordPress repository.
Hearing these statistics might give you the impression that WordPress is an inherently insecure platform. But your impression would be incorrect. WordPress is actually quite secure. The team at WordPress take security very seriously and have a well-defined process for managing potential vulnerabilities.
With a team of approximately 25 security experts that include both developers and researchers, to say they are proactive would be an understatement. WordPress also works closely with outside security professionals and hosting companies. In addition, where necessary WordPress will collaborate with other teams to resolve vulnerabilities, such as they did with Drupal after shipping version 3.9.2.
In truth, the vast majority of WordPress security vulnerabilities are a result of the thing we love most about WordPress, it’s extensibility. A shortage of highly skilled professionals means that many themes and plugins are released with unknown vulnerabilities or even made available without a pre-release security audit. As a result, they are vulnerable to attack.
Why Would Anyone Want to Hack Your WordPress Website?
As someone who is running a small business website or even a simple blog, you might find yourself wondering, “why me?” Why on earth would a hacker want spend their valuable time trying to hack into your website? It turns out there are a wide variety of reasons that can include:
1 – SEO – If a hacker is able to gain access to your website they can use your site to improve the SEO of another site by inserting back-links. Alternatively, they can insert affiliate links designed to sell something (often of little or no value, as it turns out). Basically, what they are doing here is taking advantage of your website’s good reputation to further their own malicious cause.
2 – SPAM – If you find that you website traffic has all but disappeared in a short period of time, there is a possibility that you site has been hacked for the purpose of sending SPAM email. The result of which is having your website blacklisted. Once a hacker has used and abused your website and hosting account, they simply move on to the next victim, leaving you to clean up the mess.
3 – MALWARE – Malware is a term that refers to malicious software. Hackers love to place malware on other websites because it reduces the likelihood of them being identified as the original source. Malware can do many different things including spying on a user’s actions, keylogging, spreading viruses and more.
4 – THEFT – The average person stores an amazing amount of personal information on their computer: Passwords, credit card information, banking information, and more. Gaining access to your WordPress website can provide a gateway to your personal information and even the information on your visitors’ computers.
5 – ATTACKING OTHER SITES – Sometimes a hacker’s objective is to make a website unavailable to users. These attacks are often referred to as Denial of Service attacks. In order to accomplish their task, hackers will maliciously “recruit” a network of websites to assist in the attack.
Of course, these aren’t the only reasons that a hacker might try to gain access to your WordPress website, but you get a general idea. They may be trying specifically to use your WordPress website for malicious purposes, or they might just be taking advantage of the fact that there is an open door with the potential to lead to an even bigger reward.
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