By some estimates, about 30 000 to 50 000 websites get hacked every day. The numbers are growing daily and the importance of website security is increasing rapidly. Being secure in the online world becomes more and more important every day and it is vital to protect your website and the data it holds now.
In this article, we will give you five reasons why website security is important.
Did you know - that 56% of all internet traffic is from automated sources such as hacking tools, scrapers and spammers, impersonators, and bots. So you might think - is my website secure from these tools?
Hacked websites can target your customers
Malicious software is used to infect websites, gather data and in some cases even hijack computer resources. A site where an attacker has gained access can be used to redirect traffic and infect visitors with malicious software.
It means that if your site is not protected, hackers can use your site to infect your site visitors with malware. There are thousands of different types of malware and thousands of different ways to infect your website, which is mostly all done by automated hacking tools.
What they all have in common, is that the hacked websites are mostly used to retarget your potential customers and your website visitors. The number of hacked sites rises rapidly
What they all have in common, is that the hacked websites are mostly used to retarget your potential customers and your website visitors. Another reason why website security is important - is to keep your customers safe.We’ve seen a 150% growth in vulnerabilities reported in 2021 compared to 2020 which is a significant increase.
Meanwhile, 29% of the WordPress plugins with critical vulnerabilities received no patch.
A study was made that stated that there is an attack every 39 seconds on average on the web and the non-secure usernames and passwords that are being used give attackers more chance of success.
Just to be clear - an attack does not always mean something is hacked. For example, we see thousands of attacks targeted at the websites we protect every day. In 2018 Google has sent over 45 million notifications to registered website owners through Search Console, alerting them to possible problems with their websites that could affect their appearance in a search.
Also, they sent 6 million manual action messages to webmasters about practices that were against Google’s guidelines, along with information on how to resolve the issues. And Google took action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.
Sucuri, a cloud-based firewall provider said in its report that they saw a total of 170,827,313 attack attempts that were blocked in 2019. It was a 52% increase from 2018.
Business reputation loss and drop in revenue
There are over 1,5 billion websites on the world wide web today and people rely on search engines when they want to reach information on those sites. Therefore search engine optimization is more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it can provide for every business.
Google and other search engines (for who you typically don't want to be on the naughty list) warn your customers and restrict them from entering your website. Lately, Google, for example, has stepped up the game even more.
Starting from July 2018, every website without SSL (HTTPS) will be marked as insecure and therefore receive an SEO penalty, which makes it harder for your company to reach new customers.
But the reality is that, because of a hacked website, a customer loses trust, and therefore it will lead to company reputation loss, which for e-commerce can often mean an end of the business.
When talking about website security and CMS security the infections are also rising actively. For example, WordPress continues to be the leading infected website CMS.
Vulnerabilities from plugins and themes remain one of the biggest threats to websites built on WordPress. In fact, just 0.58% of security vulnerabilities originate from WordPress core in 2021. (Source: State Of WordPress Security 2021)
On average, about 50 000 websites get hacked every day and in reality, the majority of these 50,000 sites are legitimate small businesses that are unwittingly distributing malicious code to cybercriminals.
When your site is hacked and added to different blacklists, the potential customer cannot reach the products or services being offered. Anyways, if a potential customer visits your site and gets warned or infected, there is an extremely low chance that the customer will ever visit your site again.
