WordPress dominates the CMS industry exceptionally and there’s no close competitor to this CMS giant. Unfortunately, its growing popularity has become one of the most prominent reasons that jeopardize the security of this highly popular CMS. After all, it’s a commonly understood fact in the online industry that the more popular you grow, the more prone you become to cyberattacks. Hence, ensuring your WordPress website’s security must be a priority for any business that wants to enhance its brand value and develop a huge customer base. This post will discuss some major security issues in WordPress along with their solutions so that you can run an utterly secured website for your business.
WordPress Security Stats
Almost 61% of all infected WordPress sites are supposed to have an outdated WordPress version.
More than 41% of WordPress sites were hacked through security vulnerabilities caused by their hosting platform.
Less than 38% of global WordPress sites run on the latest version of WordPress 6.0 (Source)
A website is targeted by a hacker every 39 seconds with more than 300000 malware created everyday. Apart from this, you will be surprised to know that cybercrime has become more profitable than illegal drug trade at a global level.
The cost to protect data breaches has already gone to USD 150 million in 2022. 75 website records are stolen every second globally for which more than 73% of black hat hackers said that traditional firewall and antivirus security is responsible because of its obsoleteness. (Source)
Considering the above-mentioned facts and figures, we can easily conclude that when it comes to website security, hosting service and updating to the latest WordPress version remains a critical component.
Major Security Threats to WordPress Website
Let’s discuss some other major WordPress security elements along with insights to prevent them.
Weak Passwords Are Easy to Crack
Brute Force Attack is one of the most common ways that hackers adopt to crack the security of your WordPress website. Hackers try different password combinations until they finally succeed in gaining access to your site.
What you need to do is to ensure that each user of your site creates a complex password using a password generator tool. Apart from this, you must also follow a practice to keep updating your password periodically and limit the login attempts to a minimum. You can also use a WordPress login security plugin like Loginizer to ensure protection against such brute force attacks.
Malware-Detection & Prevention
Using malware is another major practice that hackers use to infect your WordPress site and steal sensitive data from it. Using malicious code, they can easily hack your WordPress site. There are a lot of variations in these malicious codes including malicious redirect, drive-by downloads, backdoor attacks, and many more. The best way to get rid of this security threat is to prevent them. The first thing that your security experts need to examine is to detect the presence of malware in your site that can be anywhere from files and folders to the database.
Wordfence is the most trusted security plugin that you can use to detect malware on your site that comes with an endpoint firewall and a malware scanner along with a 2FA feature. You are also advised to delete corrupted files and ensure regular backup for them.
Cross-site Scripting
WordPress is known for its diverse range of plugins and XSS vulnerabilities are often found in these plugins. Hackers often load pages that contain insecure JS scripts to steal data from your browser and once your site gets injected with such scripts, hackers can easily steal data when a visitor performs any activity or fills a form on your website.
The best thing to avoid this security threat is to keep your WordPress site duly updated at regular intervals. Moreover, you can also use a handful of WordPress security plugins or can use a web application firewall WAF service.
Using Outdated Plugins & Themes
Running your WordPress site on an outdated software version makes it eligible to be attacked by hackers. Using outdated themes and plugins is also one of the most common reasons responsible for WordPress security issues. WordPress themes and plugin developers often release regular updates that include critical security patches.
These updates are available on your WordPress Admin dashboard and if you stay on top of these updates, the chances of getting prone to cyberattacks are minimized to a great extent. If you don’t remember to regularly update your plugins and themes, you can simply enable automatic updates to keep an eye on your site’s security. Moreover, we also advise you to remove unused themes and plugins and thoroughly test the latest version of your themes and plugins.
Distributed Denial of Service-Poor Hosting Service
DDoS attacks are also a common threat to any WordPress site. Generally, a site with poor hosting security is often targeted for such kinds of security attacks. Hackers deluge servers with manipulated traffic due to which sites often crash and end up in downtime.
To eliminate such security-related trouble, you can use WP Activity Log for constant monitoring of unwanted activities and track the changes that have been made across your website. The plugin also informs you about recently added files or when they are modified or deleted. The best practice is to consider a reputed and trusted web hosting service that comes with an array of security features & tools to keep your WordPress site performing safely.
The SEO Spam-Too difficult to Detect
Practicing standard SEO practices is a common way to gain top rankings on search engines where hackers can easily target some of your top-ranking web pages and blot them with spammy keywords and fake ads. This results in directing visitors to malicious sites and you end up ruining your reputation within seconds. The SO spam can be carried in by Brute Force Attack or any vulnerability in your themes and plugins. The worst part is that such spams are very critical to be detected.
To prevent this, you can use security plugins like Wordfence or use a Web Application Firewall like Sucuri. You also need to constantly monitor your analytics and identify any sudden points either in the traffic or in your SERPs.
Phishing-Users Personal Information at Stake
Phishing is a common fraudulent practice where intruders try to send fake emails claiming to be a reputed company enticing your visitors to reveal their personal information or credit card details. The link or the message generally asks users to perform an action that redirects them to a seemingly legitimate website to get their login details. If Google detects any phishing activity on our site, it may get blocked and users will lose trust in your brand.
Again, Wordfence is the possible solution to this as it constantly monitors outside activities on your site and blocks attackers making intrusion attempts.
Install a WordPress backup Solution
One of the most proactive ways to create a defense against any WordPress attack is creating a WordPress backup solution. It allows you to restore your WordPress site in case of any cyberattack. Remember, nothing is 100% secure in this highly digitalized era, hence, you must follow some best and proven practices to secure your website from any cyberattack. Make sure that you save full-site backups to some remote location that is separate from your hosting account. This is why AWS services have gotten much recognition in the past few years as it offers real-time backup for your site in case of any security breach.
Apart from this, choose some trusted WordPress security plugins and constantly monitor the activities on your website using sophisticated analytical tools. Awareness and cautiousness are the only proven ways to keep your WordPress site safe and secure to imprint trust among your users.
Endnote
Being with the world’s most popular CMS is always an advantage and to ensure optimal performance of your website, getting acquainted with WordPress security vulnerabilities will help you to plan strategically to keep your website safe from any cyberattacks. We hope that you can now take some active steps against these common WordPress Security issues. Let’s wrap this post hoping that the information offered in it will enable you to enhance your website’s security measures to add more trusted users to your customer base.
