“Why would someone want to hack my website?”

I get asked that quite a bit.

“I’m just a piano teacher/acupuncturist/gardener/etc. Why would someone want to hack my website?”

Three reasons:

Defacement

There are people who run around the internet looking for vulnerable websites either just for fun or because they are part of a cause – “Free the Algerian Freedom Fighters” or similar.

Black Hat SEO

Ransomware

This is a relatively new attack that we’ve started seeing in the past year or so.  The hacker surreptitiously implants malware into your website.  When your website visitors innocently click on a link on your website their computer is immediately infected.  The infection encrypts all files on you website visitor’s computer and then display a message describing what to pay (and to whom) to get their data back. If the infected computer is on a network then it will do the same to other computers on the same network.

This is really nasty.  Imagine receiving a phone call from your best customer telling you that your website has infected their computer(s) with a virus.