There’s a client of ours who host their WordPress based website on their own server which we do not have access to.
On Monday, their site was hacked and the home page was replaced with some Israeli propaganda. We advised them how to clean it up (since we had no access) and they got it sorted out. Then they were hacked again on Wednesday with a Russian front page. And again on Friday.
They only found out they were hacked when they had clients calling them up asking them what the deal was. To make things worse they were paying for Adwords. We stopped the campaign as soon as we found out, but can you imagine if they were paying to send potential new customers to a hacked site?
It’s one of the worst feelings when this happens.
There’s a lot of things that can make your site vulnerable to being hacked. Sometimes, there are exploits discovered which hackers can take advantage of before the rest of the world is able to create patches and fix those holes. They are called 0-day exploits, and are completely unavoidable.
Recently, there were security problems discovered in OpenSSL and Bash. These are two packages installed on a huge majority of servers worldwide, so the exploits were huge news. The IT world scrambled to patch their servers, but many were vulnerable for days, and many probably still are.
So can you protect yourself against these things? Absolutely.
By regularly backing up your site and having a recovery plan in place, you can be back up and running in minutes after your site gets hacked.
Backups are in my opinion, completely necessary, yet not many sites are regularly backed up. That’s why we’ve tried to make it really affordable for small businesses to get their site backed up, and get the peace of mind that comes along with it.
Unfortunately, no one really worries about backups until everything comes crashing down overnight. It happens more regularly than you’d think…
If you would like to protect yourself against your site being hacked, as well as other disasters like web hosting failures, check out our WordPress backups and maintenance packages starting at $29 / month.