WordPress’ Popularity Made Itself A Prime Target For Hackers

Imperva’s recent research

Recently Imperva conducted a research which shows that WordPress Content Management System (CMS) is 24.1% more likely to get attacked compared to other CMSs combined.

The research goes into details that websites using WordPress system has 60% more XSS incidents than those using other CMS platforms. It also concludes that hackers attack WP sites with higher traffic and frequency.

 

Popularity of WordPress made it a prime target

So far in the world there are approximately 75 million websites built based on WordPress CMS. The popularity of WordPress is a major reason for such a high attack rate. Hackers tend to use the most popular CMS and make it a profitable conduct. As the statistics go, about half of the attacks focused on retail WordPress built websites, as many of them tend to have a login system, hackers would then exploit the loophole and obtain customers’ private informations.

Worries from IaaS providers

Amichai Shulman, from Imperva also points out that infrastructure-as-a-service providers have more and more being used by hackers, an example is that 20% of all detected attacks are from Amazon Web Services. Many worry that if this situation has not gone under control, more and more IaaS providers will be the exploited.