All Business Owners now have to start educating themselves about security risks and data protection.
There are so many elements to the overall topic of cyber security, most of which is very technical and not the most interesting of reads to most of us. To keep it real for you we will start touching on important security news and keep our customers as up to date as possible.
What happens if my website gets hacked? – in short, complete chaos!
At Searchsmart we keep uncovering security issues for several of our client’s websites. We found that some would go offline while others would redirect to pharma sites or embed client-side malware. Others would silently send mass-email out without a single change to the public website. Hacking is so widespread that it is hard to pinpoint the exact same type of hack on every site. If a clients website gets compromised they usually contact us at Searchsmart to fix the issues in which as a small digital agency, we are limited in our capacity to take on all that extra work, especially if the hack numbers are high. This problem would also blow out our customers in waiting for their new website builds or amendments, which is hardly fair. Searchsmart has had to look at this risk factor to their agency and bring on a third party to assist with getting websites cleaned and back online quickly. After researching solutions and different approaches, Searchsmart landed with Sucuri because of its website firewall which runs on top of the website, on any server and in any environment.
Prior to implementing the Sucuri Firewall, many of the sites Searchsmart hosts would undergo hundreds, if not thousands, of different bot attacks on a weekly basis. These attacks ranged from DDoS, to brute force login attempts, to xmlrpc, or even direct plugin access. Previously Searchsmart used security plugins inside of WordPress and found they were not robust enough to handle all vectors of attacks; attacks can come through channels that plugins simply can’t cover. Although investment in security partners went up, Searchsmart realised they had to make the change to better protect their client websites, and only recommend and offer the best security product on the market.
Sucuri Hacked Website Report 2017
In the report when analysing WordPress websites, it is interesting to see that there has been an increase in hacks from 2016 to 2017. The warning to WordPress website owners really is to be aware and to secure your website now, if it has been done for you already. It is better to detect and protect than let things slide until you do ‘get hacked’, which nobody in their right mind would ever want to happen to them. The processes and costs involved to clean an infected website would cost hundreds and thousands of dollars due to the hours and tasks involved.
There are many tasks involved when rectifying and reinstating a compromised website. One of the most major time-consuming tasks is applying for your website to be removed from Blacklists.
What are Blacklists?
For example; when a website has been flagged by a blacklist authority (such as Google), the results are devastating. Blacklisting can affect how visitors access your website, how it ranks in search engine result pages (SERP) and how adversely it can affect communication mediums like email.
Google alone blacklists 10,000 websites every day. With over 100 blacklisting authorities, that means a lot of websites are being blocked for serving malicious content. When a website is blacklisted, it loses nearly 95% of organic traffic, causing serious risks to your business and its brand.
Maintaining your website integrity and reputation is a big responsibility. Blacklisting authorities feel the same way about protecting their users. They will quickly flag your website if they have evidence that it could be harmful. Most often a malicious payload is hidden on your website that could possibly infect visitors, including executable files, trojan horses, phishing schemes, Pharma hacks, and information scrapers. Most of the time, the website owner is not aware that they’ve been hacked until it is too late.
Don’t leave it too late to secure YOUR website. Speak with Searchsmart today for a free security risk assessment.
