The maintenance of a website in 2015 must include protections from dubious users who seek to gain access to your site. Hacking and cracking are real and the perpetrators are usually better equipped and more tech savvy than the average business owner in the U.S. Hackers and crackers have varying motivations and objectives when trying to get into your framework and few are as blatant as to reveal their presence, unless that is their objective.

Since Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. has been and continues to hack objectives in the world, the world is hacking back. And never forget, that our children are the ones that like to do it just for kicks. So what are the motivations of a hacker? Sometimes they are trying to take over your website to visibly say something. This is rare, because the user will notice it and take action to remove the hacker from the system. I have only seen one instance of this, and it was an Iranian, who published a message on the site’s homepage.

More likely the hacker wants to gain access to your system. They may just be whetting their chops trying to hack you in preparation for a bigger hack on a bigger system. Sometimes this includes their testing of their automated cracking software on your gateway.

And many times there is a serious objective. They want to link farm off of your backend and make your site serve links that you would never approve of. Or even worse, they use your servers to send out SPAM and get your domain shut down for serving it. Typically a hack is never as bad as your last clean backup. So taking measures is important to the standard practices your should incorporate as a website owner.

Hackers will continue to find vulnerabilities in web programming, it’s pretty much what they live to do. You just have to be aware and ahead of the game. Keeping your website up to date, backed up and monitored is nothing short of what you would do to protect your home or your business property. It’s becoming an important part of basic website maintenance.

WordPress 4.3 update

Last week WordPress posted a major security release and update to their systems and their vendors were encouraged to immediately update their programming.