Are you unintentionally helping cyber criminals distribute malicious code to your customers, friends and family through your website? Read on to find out, and how to prevent it. (Or Click Here to get your site tested for FREE) As scary as the thought may be, more and more WordPress websites are being found silently distributing malicious code because they’ve become infected with website malware (malicious software) under the radar of the site owners and administrators. It’s true, 30,000 new websites are identified EVERY DAY distributing malicious code to their visitors! (according to Sophos Labs) The majority of these 30,000 sites belong to ordinary small businesses. It’s not that the cybercriminals are targeting each specific small business they infect. Instead they have created automated tools that crawl the web for vulnerable sites. If a vulnerable site is found, these programs will automatically infect the host site and begin sending out more copies of itself to any passers by. Thus these automated programs, or “bots” can spread and infect many sites secretly before they are detected. Just 5 years ago, these malicious bots played a much smaller role on the web so malware infections on WordPress websites were a less common problem. But over these last few years, malicious bot traffic has increased to a whopping 30% of all web traffic! (According to Incapsula) Here at HogTheWeb.com our security team has noticed this increasing trend as well. When looking at the statistics from one of our clients websites that is protected by our Firewall, we can see that almost HALF of the traffic coming to this site had to be blocked because it was detected to be malicious. That client was very happy that she had our firewall in place, otherwise her site would have almost certainly become infected. If you’re concerned if your WordPress website is vulnerable or already infected, you can get a free scan by the HogTheWeb security team HERE. Here are the top 5 basic steps you can take to ensure your WordPress website is protected from such intrusions. 1. Keep Your WordPress, Plugins, and Themes All Up to Date One of primary reasons that developers come out with updated versions of their software is because security vulnerabilities are detected and must be patched and closed to prevent intrusions. If you don’t keep your site software up to date, then you aren’t closing these security holes that will inevitably be entry points for malware. Did you ever notice that after you do a lot of site updates some of the things on your site get out of whack? This is a common grievance of WordPress users. This is due to the fact that every plugin and theme, and WordPress itself is developed by a totally different team of developers, and each configuration of the hundreds of plugins and themes has never been tested with the updated code before they take it live. So your site ends up being the test site for your particular configuration of plugins and themes. Unfortunately this […]
The following article WordPress Security-How To Keep Your Website Safe Online was originally seen on www.mastermindseo.org
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