In 2019, the world experienced multiple cyber-attacks and the trend didn't change in the first quarter of 2020. The attacks have further increased following millions of people working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The threat landscape of 2020
According to researchers at SiteLock, the things will only worsen in the rest of 2020 and beyond. The US-based website cybersecurity solution provider had conducted detailed research involving over seven million business sites.
WordPress targeted
The SiteLock researchers have observed that every site around the world is facing 94 attacks every day, 52 per cent more than in 2019. The report claims that since January 2020, sites around the world are encountering fifteen attacks per minute.
The website certification authority found that the WordPress-based sites are being targeted three times more than the sites based on other platforms such as Joomla. The researchers held third-party plugins responsible for the increasing number of attacks. SiteLock claims that the probability of experiencing a cyber attack gets doubled with every five plugins you install on your site. So a WordPress site having 20 plugins or more would face seven times more attacks than a non-WordPress site.
Malware count
SiteLock says there are around 12.8 million malware-riddled sites on the internet. One site out of every 100 is infested with malware. The site attacks are increasing mostly because of the vulnerabilities that exist in SQLI, CSRF and XXS. The XXS vulnerabilities eye installing a backdoor on the victim's site. Once compromised, the attacker installs minacious Java script codes to each page on the site, resulting in a redirection of traffic to malicious advertisement sites.
The SiteLock researchers claim around 88 per cent of the victimised sites never get tracked by the search engine, resulting in nine out of 10 infected sites rank on Google and other search engine results even after getting infected.
