Why Does Your WordPress Site Need A WordPress Malware Scanner ?
Powering over a third of the all websites on the internet, WordPress is an extremely popular and useful tool for anyone who wants to create and maintain a website. This popularity along with making WordPress extremely feature rich and customisable does come with some drawbacks. Give the popularity of WordPress among both hobbyists and professionals, it has attracted and continues to be the target of choice for hackers and other malicious actors.
In just one month on hacker is reported to have attacked 1 Million different WordPress Sites. These attacks are mostly run scattershot against any and every website that malicious actor can find. Most of these attacks are looking for vulnerabilities present in your site which could be leveraged to gain access to your site. From what we have observed across the past few years, the most common attack vectors through which attackers gain access to a site are:
- Brute Force Attacks – Here attackers, try to gain access to your WordPress Site by trying hundreds of thousands of combinations of username and passwords.
- Through Vulnerable Plugins or Themes -Statistically 98% of WordPress vulnerabilities are related to plugins.
- Through Un-updated versions of WordPress Core – Accounting for 37% of attacks on WordPress Sites.
What do Hackers Do After Gaining Access to your WordPress Site
After getting access to a site through methods listed above, we have observed a pattern that the hackers follow; that has persisted across almost all attacks.
- They create pages or modify existing ones, including in them links to phishing sites or other malicious content.
- They install a backdoor into your website, by downloading and installing a malicious plugin on your WordPress instance.
- They host malicious files, and viruses on your site, using it as a source for their malware campaigns.
Of special note here, is that, these attackers try their hardest to remain undetected by the admins of the website. Most of the time the attackers are only detected after the website has been black listed by Google or after the entire website is flagged as hosting malicious content. This can lead to severe monetary losses to the website, as the websites SEO ranking and reputation takes a big hit.