Why do hackers (crackers) hack and tamper with WordPress? We will explain the motives of hackers who tamper with WordPress and the consequences of being hacked.
What motivates hackers to try to tamper with WordPress?
Hackers have a variety of motives for hacking and taking over WordPress sites, but most of the defacement sites we have seen seem to be for financial gain.
1 Money
If the hacker’s goal is to gain financial gain by hacking, the following modifications will be made.
Directing visitors to your site to other sites (to help increase revenue and traffic to those sites and earn money)
Induce users to download or purchase malicious software
Sending spam emails.
Infecting your computer with viruses to steal credit card information, etc.
Stealing credit card information by stealing login information for various services.
Stealing or mining virtual currency wallet information
2 For attacks on other sites
There is also botnet, which is a tampering to use your site as a stepping stone site to attack another site through hacking.
In this case, the motive is not only for monetary purposes, but also to use your site as a stepping stone to take down a specific site based on some ideological beliefs through a ddos attack or other means.
3 To test your skills
Surprisingly, the motive is neither money nor ideological, but simply to test your skills to see if you can do it.
Consequences of being hacked
If a site is hacked and defaced, what are the negative effects?
We will explain some of the most common negative effects, in order of most common.
1 Users who visit the site are redirected to other sites.
In this case, the user may be exposed to fraudulent content or a virus infection on the other site’s page.
2 Users are excluded from search engine results.
If a search engine determines that your site has been hacked and blacklists your site, your page may be excluded from search results. In this case, the inflow of traffic via search engines may be very low for a long period of time.
3 Spam Mail Stepping Stones
If your site becomes a spammer’s stepping stone, your domain may send out a large number of fraudulent or virus-laden e-mails.
In this case, users who receive such e-mails may suffer some form of damage. In addition, if your domain is on the blacklist of spammers, your site’s domain may be blocked by spamblockers.
4 Data theft
If WordPress has been tampered with, it means that the information in the database can also be stolen. However, the data recorded in the WordPress database is often not of much value to hackers because passwords and other data are encrypted, and if you are not running an e-commerce site, the database does not contain much dangerous personal information.
Legal Liability for Hacked Sites
In this case, strictly speaking, there is a possibility of legal problems if a user who asks about the hacked site suffers some damage.
However, it was the hacker who hacked the site and planted the malicious code, and most hackers are overseas (it is not easy to identify who hacked the site even by examining the server logs). (It is not easy to determine who hacked the server by examining the server logs. In addition, users are not directly affected by the defaced site, but often do not suffer any damage unless they take some action on the site to which they jumped from the defaced site. We have not heard of any legal problems with users who accessed your site because of WordPress defacement.
However, there have been cases where the company that maintains the site and the company from which the site is operated have been sued because they missed the defacement. We have produced documents at the request of these companies to prove that their sites had been hacked and defaced.
We believe it is very important to prevent WordPress sites from being tampered with, to operate sites with security in mind on a daily basis, and to restore sites quickly in the event of a hacking incident.
Reference
Five free WordPress security measures
Free WordPress: Malware Scan & Security Plug-in [Malware and Virus Detection and Removal].
