Why Hack My Site?
Video Transcript
In this class, I want to try and convince you that hackers will want to hack your WordPress site, even though it’s only a small blog or only has funny cat videos on it, or whatever, fill in the blank.
And to be clear, hackers do not only have eyes on WordPress sites, but any site on the web. It just so happens at WordPress is about one every three to four sites on the internet. So they just appear to have a larger target on their back. Now, one reason that a hacker has targeted your cat video site is because they are new to this hacking thing. And they are just looking for a site to hack. And we’ll break into the first one that they come by another reason and a more plausible reason is for the money.
Once the hacker has gotten into your site, they can insert malware that adds affiliate links to your site, or just redirects all of your traffic to their site. Or maybe they are paid by a competitor to take down the site, not whether they’re motivated by money or whatever the reason, the harder your site is to break into, the quicker that that hacker will move on to the next site. Now it’s important to understand that many of the items that are covered in these classes on securing the WordPress site are mostly protection from automated hackers or bots. Now it’s unlikely that a single person is typing away on their keyboard, trying to guess your username and password.
But instead, it’s more likely that there are several automated bots guessing hundreds of possibilities a second. Now one of the many beauties of WordPress being open source is that there are more good people working to keep it secure than there are bad people trying to break into it. Now hopefully I’ve convinced you that having any set on the internet means that there’s a risk of being hacked. Luckily, there are many things that are easy to put in place that not just makes your site less hackable, but we’ll keep it off the hackers radar in the first place. That’s going to bring us to the end of this class on knowing why someone would want to hack your site.
Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.