Isn’t it annoying to find out that your WordPress site has been hacked? Here are some reasons that hackers may be interested in your WordPress site.
Do not be surprised to know that hackers gain profit from hacking even your ‘little’ WordPress site.
For instance, although the hacker’s focus may not be your website per se, they can gain free electricity and the power of the webserver that your computer is using to hide their real identity while using another server or for ‘mining’ digital currencies such as Bitcoin. This is done through ‘hotlinking’ and stealing your server bandwidth.
Hackers use your server to send spam emails so that they cannot be traced back to their own computers. Spam means money! When someone does not delete a spam email right away, they, unfortunately, end up helping the spam business model. When a website address or a hosting company gets tagged as a spam source, they have to pay in terms of time and money to clean up.
The hackers also insert malicious content and links into different webpages to sell specific products, which may not be even necessary to be clicked on or may not be visible altogether. These links are there so that only certain search engines can see them in order to assist in the increase of search rankings or SEO of the destination websites, which can also be the hacker’s own website.
Yet another very important factor that interests hackers is the spread of viruses and distribution of malware. It is very easy to modify a hacked website in a way that it can spread viruses to its visitors whose system securities are not up to date. These viruses then help to continue this vicious cycle. Viruses do a lot many other things such as encrypt your files that require payment to be decrypted or install ransomware, insert ads into every website that you visit so that either the advertisement space providers or the actual sellers earn money, log clicks. They may use presses on a computer to steal personal information viz. online banking passwords or private business-related data, send spam to your followers, use your server to host phishing pages such as leaving a form on your website to extract user information or guide them to another website from where this information can be collected, and so on.
Finally, there is always the reason that someone enjoys vandalism, defaming others, and hence, resorts to hacking online. Some people always enjoy exploiting vulnerabilities.
Hackers make continuous attempts to try to break into your WordPress website. Never think that your website is too small, not interesting, or very new to be hacked. Just take some basic security measures and always be alert!
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