It is known that hacking is an increasingly widespread practice; security systems are becoming more secure, but hackers are getting better. Speaking of numbers, how many sites are hacked each year?
Google knows. Last year, Big G conducted a study in collaboration with UK Berkeley, which aimed to investigate how many sites were hacked between July 2014 and June 2015.
The results revealed that 760,935 sites were hacked, a third of which are in English, which is not surprising considering it is the most used language for websites. In second place, however, are sites in Chinese, followed by German, Japanese, and Russian.
The study also found that 80% of admins managed to eradicate the infection from their site on the first attempt and that only 12% experienced a new attack within the following 30 days.
Why was this research conducted? Google wanted to test the effectiveness of Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators, which, by alerting admins to security breaches and the presence of harmful URLs on their sites, should make it 50% more likely to eliminate ongoing issues.
How to avoid hacker attacks?
There are practices that, if properly executed, significantly reduce the likelihood of sites being hacked:
- Choose complex passwords.
- Constantly update platforms and plugins.
- Enhance security on the server side.
- Activate antispam and security protocols on the server.
