Why Someone Would Hack My Website
Why someone would hack my website is the first question I asked myself when my websites were recently hacked.
Whoever did the deed caused me a lot of down time, a great deal of money, a substantial loss of readership and potential damage to our Home Based Internet Marketing Information site’s reputation.
Why someone would hack my website seemed to be a mystery; especially since no financial information is ever posted on it?
It’s not a bank site, it’s not an AdSense site, a membership site or a storefront. So, why would someone bother?
Well after doing quite a bit of researach, I came up with the following reasons that should interest everyone having a web presence.
- Theft of user information
- Theft of server information
- Search Engine Optimization
- Promoting other people’s products or services
- Hosting objectionable and/or illegal content
- Intentionally defacing a website
- Malicious mischief
Theft of user information is probably the most obvious and frequent reason for the hacking of websites.
Regardless of what type website you run, hackers can collect a surprising amount of personal information that can be used for identity theft or other nefarious reasons.
Even the most basic information can be useful to a hacker.
At a minimum, “user”s will store their email address, password, username, etc. along with other “users” information.
Theft of your list of users’ information could give hackers access to your members’ accounts on other websites
A users email address on a popular website is a valuable commodity and can be sold for a great deal of money to list builders and other hackers.
Email addresses can be used by hackers to run spam email campaigns without the knowledge of the user or to gain access to a users other accounts online.
Unfortunately, the majority of people on the Internet use the same user name and password to access multiple website accounts.
You should never have the same user name and password on multiple websites, but the fact remains that over 70% of users do.
Although most websites do not store passwords in plain text, even password hashes can be useful to hackers.
Theft of Server Information is another reason why someone would hack my website.
In addition to stealing your users’ information from your website, hackers could be looking for information stored on your server.
Your server stores your database, email addresses, user name and password for all the sites they host for you.
Hackers with access to that type of information could easily steal additional information, mess with your site’s content or do other nasty things to your websites.
Hackers are able to find security holes via SQL injection, alter your Database records to include Javascript includes that will either execute a dialer or inject web links for SEO purposes, to increase page rank or to promote products or services to make money for themselves.
Search Engine Optimization is yet another reason why someone would hack my website.
We all know that one of the best ways to improve a site ranking in the search engines is to have back-links to website content from other sites that have some value in related searches.
Websites with a high relevancy to a particular search term that have
links to other websites from it, give the other websites the probability of also having a high relevancy to that search term.
This is why hackers frequently execute dialers or inject web link redirects onto a site.
The web links are frequently not even on the same subject matter as your website, in fact they may not even be in your language.
Often, just to increase the number of times their website shows up in the search results, hackers will insert links to some malicious website that simply tries to harm other people’s computers.
They also might try to promote their own products or services by inserting links, visible or otherwise on your site.
Visible links give your visitors the impression that you support the other site that’s being promoted however, it’s easier to discover that your site has been hacked when the hackers use this technique.
This is a good reason to monitor your website on a regular basis.
Hackers often inject links to malicious websites that can harm your users’ computers or sell products and services that are fraudlent.
They use your website’s good reputation and ranking to promote their nasty deeds.
Hosting objectionable and/or illegal content is a type of website defacement that has a definite purpose.
Adult, pornographic, illegal and objectionable websites often have problems with their hosting.
When hosting is unattainable or too expensive, hackers will often resort to trying to use other people’s websites to host their own site content.
If this should happen, your website could be shut down and you could be subject to civil liabilities or even criminal penalties.
In the event your site is not immediately shut down, your hosting costs will skyrocket because of the unusually large amount of video content or photos that are being uploaded.
Intentionally defacing a website is something that can occur with any type of site, particularly if it has more than two users.
There is usually no rhyme or reason behind intentionally defacing a site other than someone just wanting to cause you an embarrassment.
Hackers don’t necessarily need a reason to deface your website. Some do it just for the hell of it and others do it just to add a website to their “resume” of hacked sites.
All websites are vulnerable.
User mischief is another reason why someone would hack your website
If you run a forum, a gaming site, a photography site or a site with any kind of social interactive element to it, you will eventually run across a user who will cause you mischief.
Facebook users experience this type of user mischief on a daily basis but it’s been going on long before Facebook and “social networking” became stylish.
This type of attack rarely serves any useful purpose. It’s seems to be just the dark side of human nature.
Unfortunately, many people who use the Internet just enjoy embarrassing or harming other people, and as meaningless as it is, they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing so.
Website security is an important consideration for all websites and should be taken seriously.
Regardless of how simple or large your website, no website in existence is immune to all the things I have described above.
As I was trying to figure out why someone would hack my website, it became apparent that if your website hasn’t been the target of a hacker attack yet, it’s just a matter of time before they discover you.
Reader Comments
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