Does WordPress get hacked a lot?
WordPress is the most popular CMS for building and customizing a website with ease, making it a great choice for beginners in web design. But its popularity also hurts WordPress by being a target of many hackers and malicious websites. Open-source features in WordPress increase the chances of getting hacked.
So, what do you think of WordPress as a secure or hackable website?
Everytime WordPress is out of line is not because it’s hacked. It can also happen due to any bugs and errors. It is hard to know if the website is hacked or not in the start.
Almost 43 percent of cyberattacks target small business websites for financial gains and other uses as well. There are still people with a thought of their site not getting hacked.
How to know if WordPress gets hacked?
- Loading issues often happen on a website. Malicious attacks can be a possible reason for not loading. Notice the error message that occurs while the page is not responding. You can find the cause through the type of error message displayed. Some of the errors include
HTTP 500 Internal Server Error: It notifies you of a problem on the website server which can be because of any caching issues, outdated plugins, or due to hacking.
HTTP 502 Bad Gateway Error or 503 Service Unavailable: This error occurs when a huge amount of traffic enters the site. Sometimes a sudden increase in traffic indicates that the site is under attack.
401 Unauthorized and 403 Forbidden: This error message appears by informing you that you have no permission to access the server. It usually occurs when passwords are changed or refusal of host. - A malware warning message will be displayed while a user try to visit and load the website. Google Safe Browsing is used to detect malware or any hacking attempt.
- Any changes happened in the website that is not done by you occurs when it is likely to be hacked. It can be any change in content, an ad or popups, or any links or popups.
- Security plugin notifies you by mail if any suspicious activities are happening in the website.
- Redirecting from your website visited to any other websites indicates that a hacker hacked your website.
How to fix a hacked wordpress website?
First thing to do once you find some issues on the site is to check on some basic things to confirm before concluding it as someone hacked website.
-Reload the website for a few times
-Clear cache and cookies
-Try to restart the browser and device
If this don’t work you canmove on to further procedures to fix or resolve the issue.
- Scan your website to detect malware and fix it
- Restore from a backup file
- Reset all passwords and remove all user accounts that seems suspicious
- Update Software
Site scanners are available to scan and detect malwares, or any red flags pointing towards a possible hack. Wordpress website scanner will also repair malware issues ansd protect the website with regular scanning.
If you are not able to remove the malware or confused of disinfection, you can restore the backup file stored in the host or using plugins like Jetpack. But still there are chances of losing data especially from ecommerce sites which includes blog posts, any orders that are unprocessed, or any recent changes made.
Even after removing the malware it is a must to reset all the passwords. Use “suggested password” button for creating new password, and to make sure the new password to be set is a complex one and that is really hard to guess. Also remove all kinds of user accounts that look suspicious.
There are high chances of hacking and vulnerabilities occur in an outdated software. So keep the wordpress core updated and use the latest version of its plugins and themes. A full backup should be taken before updation starts.
