Securing And Defending Your WordPress Blogs From Hackers In 2015

April 30, 2015

So far this year WordPress hackers have broken every record to date…and this should concern anyone who runs a WordPress site.

Back in 2012 an estimated 192,000 WordPress sites were hacked. Now there would have been an overall lesser number of WordPress sites 3 years ago but there still about 58 million of them. So 192,000 hacks would be less than 1% of that number.

In 2013, the number of hacks rose sharply with an estimated 30,000 sites, PER DAY, being hacked. That’s almost 11,000,000 sites in 2013. By the end of that year, there were estimated to be about 75,000,000 WordPress sites in existence. So 15% of sites got hacked that year.

Just last year, over 160,000 WP sites were compromised and used in one DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

Back in December, Google blacklisted over 11,000 malware-infected WordPress domains, so no more traffic for them – and over 100,000 sites in total were affected by that new malware campaign…

Hacking is predicted to double again this year and what’s worse is that hackers have found new ways of amplifying the attacks to make them even more destructive.

CNN, Forbes, Obamacare, Daft Punk, ECC, Angry Birds, EA Games were all hacked in 2014 & that’s with security experts at hand…though many of those sites weren’t running WordPress or other aspects (like databases) were specifically hacked.

So the question is: How secure is your WordPress site today and can it survive the ongoing barrage of bad traffic?

With just 15 minutes of your time, your site can be secured with this.

Did you know that about 3 out of 4 blogs eventually get hacked and even dormant blogs get hacked?!

How WordPress Blogs Get hacked:

78% of WordPress sites are either not running the latest version of WordPress, not using the latest version of their blog’s theme or are using out-of-date plugins (or a combination of all three!). This makes it easier for hackers to gain access to a blog.

I’ve had our own blogs hacked before and it sucks…plain and simple. It takes an age (time and money) to figure out where all the holes were, patch them up and put added security in place to avoid it happening again.

All in all, it costs lots of wasted time and money that all could have been avoided if I’d of taken the necessary precautions and steps.

The thing is, some of the holes were hard to find and I didn’t even know about them until it was too late.

That’s why I delved into WordPress security issues and ways of mitigating hack attacks. Out of that came Top Design Blogs, a service I set up for creating secure WordPress blogs from the outset. Prevention is better than cure after all. We build SEO, secure, fast WP sites for affiliate marketers, individuals and small businesses so all they have to worry about is adding content. Everything else is taken care of.

But that doesn’t address the issue that faces existing WordPress site owners who are worried (or should be) about their sites being hacked and compromised and what that can do for their brand, reputation and bottom line.

I’ve had it in mind to create a course about securing a WordPress blog from hackers (based on my book) but time has never been on my side. That’s why I’m so glad to see that Matt Garrett has put together a solid step by step blueprint to help WordPress users get their blogs secured.

Garrett says…

BlogDefender WordPress Security has a “0” hacked site record since it was released in 2012″, but admits this record will be hard to keep. “This year we had to rewrite BlogDefender from scratch just to keep up with hackers.

That being said we believe BlogDefender 2015 is toughest WordPress Security released to date.

It’s simple to deploy and it runs WordPress in stealth mode so it’s hidden from general hacking attacks.

The product now covers low volume botnet attacks, spammers, bad spiders, content scrapers & other known bandwidth killers and much more, all updated for 2015.

Garrett says no other product or service has gone to these lengths to keep sites secure and bad traffic out.

He’s probably right.

Yet Another WordPress Update

As you might have noticed, for the umpteenth time this month, yet another vulnerability has been found and plugged in WordPress!

On April 27th, there was a critical security release for all previous versions of WP and website owners were strongly encouraged to update their sites immediately.

The WordPress team had been made aware of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, which could enable commenters to compromise a site.

Watch the video here to discover why your blog is being targeted and what you can do about it.

Don’t leave it until it’s too late, the fall out from having your blog hacked can be far worse than you might expect…

My Bonus If You Order Through This Page

If you buy Blog Defender through any of the links on this page, I’ll knock $30 off the price of building a Secure Base Blog or a Secure Niche Blog over at Top Design Blogs. Just check your Bonus in JVZoo after you order for the discount links.

To put that in perspective, a Secure Base Blog is a secure, hardened, SEO and fast WordPress blog that comes with Premium mobile friendly theme and uses the best security and bot management plugins. These blogs are ready to have content added to them. They normally cost $79 but with this offer, you can get one for $49 (a saving of 38%). You can see what you get with a Secure Base Blog here.

A Secure Niche Blog is essentially the same thing but with 5 100% unique, high quality articles with images to get the blog off to a good start. Normally $199, with this offer you can get one for $169. You can see what you get with a Secure Niche Blog here.