In this 21st century, having basic Internet skills is a must for every human being. As globalization takes place, the world becomes a smaller place. People spend more time in the digital world looking for an escape from their own lives. Many people capitalized on this, and started building their websites in order to provide services to people online. Be it blogs, gaming websites, small businesses or even your occasional scammers.
WordPress is a platform which enables users to build their own website without any prior knowledge. There are a wide variety of resources available for you to utilize in order to get started with your first website.
Hundreds upon thousands of plugins and themes are made available by the community for your use. You can integrate them in to your website and manage every single one of them through your admin panel according to your needs.
However not every person lurking on this platform harbors good intentions. People with malicious agendas are always on the lookout for weak security protocols present in websites created by other people in order to exploit and use them for their own gain. Such hackers use a variety of ways to achieve this.
Most of these are automated or work on scripts saving these hackers the trouble of manually searching for weak chinks. These scripts usually work by looking for the most common security flaws in a website.
Therefore it is your responsibility to maintain your website’s integrity by keeping it safe and up to date in order to be wary of such attacks. However, not all website owners follow good security practices. The easiest way for hackers to gain access to an account is by cracking the username and password of your account.
Since you are the owner of the website, it is extremely important for you to maintain a strong username and password. This is because unlike other accounts, your account holds the power over your entire websites. If a hacker gains access to these credentials it might spell doom for your website as it grants them access to your admin panel.
However beware as this is not the only way for hackers to gain access to your admin panel. They can use other methods such as SQL Injection, XSS or JavaScript Injection to spam your website with malware which can be user for a greater exploit afterwards.
The reason why your admin panel is the most crucial thing for your website is because it grants access to the entire website at your fingertips. To give an example, you can edit your webpages within your website, modify your plugins and themes, view your visitor’s data or even delete your entire website from the face of the Internet.
If you own a business website, it is crucial for you to collect information about your user’s habits in order to know their needs and interests so that you can provide the best possible experience for them. You also collect some information about themselves so that users can get a sense of familiarity.
This provides you with a vast dataset which helps provide insights as to how you can better your website. However this data is safe only as long as the person who is handling that data has good intentions.
If a hacker hacks in to your admin panel, they can get access to this database and that can prove fatal to your users as it contains their Personally Identifiable Information such as their name, phone number, email addresses and even their home addresses. If this data gets leaked, your users can get easily doxed or have their identity stolen which will have a impact on their lives and cause them to lose trust on your website.
Similarly, if you allow monetary transactions to take place on your website it can land you in hot water with the PCI DSS certification body. Hackers can get access to sensitive credit card information, bank details of your customers which can lead to them making fraudulent transactions using those devices which will cripple your customer base even further.
They may be able to redirect your site visitors to other scam webpages or phishing links to exploit your website even further. The naïve user can fall prey to such scams and may end up losing a lot of money. At the end of all this debacle you end up at a terrible stage.
Your website is ruined with bleak chances of getting it back, your SEO drops to zero and you end up being blacklisted on search engines like Google. Your credibility within the industry drops and visitors no longer trust you owing to your website falling prey to cyber attacks. Your sales can take a hit as the online audience you have gathered might not have access to your physical store.
That’s why it is absolutely necessary to keep your website with top of the line security and practice good security protocols in order to safeguard your website. It is always said that ‘Precaution is better than cure’. This is applicable to your website as well. You should invest in good security for your website so that any cyber attack carried out on your website can be thwarted easily.
You should always update all your plugins and themes to the latest version available as they often contain patches to vulnerabilities discovered by developers. You should have a strong and unique passphrase which is a combination of alphanumeric characters in order to impart maximum strength to your website’s login.
We hope that you were able to get insights on the importance of your admin panel and why it is important to safeguard it as well as the consequences of not doing so. If you follow these measures accordingly, you wouldn’t have to worry about your website getting hacked and more importantly retaining control of your admin panel to only yourself. You will be able to grow your website substantially and achieve greater heights in your business.
If you want to secure your website and doesn’t know how to do it, you can contact our team and we would love to help
