When someone hacks a website, what are they trying to accomplish? Some just do it for fun while others have more dangerous things in mind and even worse, financial interests.
Some hackers like to show off and will maybe replace your home page with a huge announcement that says your site has been defaced. Not very nice but if you have a backup it can be fairly easy to repair. Other hack attempts are done to improve a website ranking in Google using hidden keywords injected on innocent sites. This is frowned upon and has negative impact on your own search engine ranking.
There are, however, often more dangerous consequences to having a hacked website. Most hackers don’t leave big announcements but try to go undetected. Hackers perform web page hacks by injecting code to trick users and redirect them towards sites that are designed to retrieve users’ bank account details or email addresses, in other words scam or phishing sites.
Another major issue to consider is that a hack can mean your site becomes a distributor of illegal material. Malicious users might store illicit content such as child pornography on your website so it is then distributed to others, yet remaining untraceable. There could be serious legal implications and irreparable damage to reputation on top of the guilt that you’d no doubt feel.
These things are mentioned not to scare you but raise awareness that having a hacked website is a very serious issue that should be avoided. Even big businesses have collapsed after having a hacked website due to financial loss and legal consequences.
Any online presence should be secured. Even if you have even a small blog, you’ll want to keep your website and most importantly of all your visitors and their information in a safe environment so that they keep coming back.
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