Page 87 - Cyber Defense Magazine RSA Edition for 2021

We also asked if they are worried about the security of the websites and more than 73% of digital
agencies and freelancers said they are increasingly worried about website security.

PS! This number was slightly higher (75%) among WordPress digital agencies and freelancers who use
WordPress as their main platform.

Websites are being hacked

We also discovered that 25% of the responders have seen a hacked website in the past month prior to
participating in the survey. This gives us a good understanding about the magnitude of the problem.

Websites are infected with malware and used to run further attacks against other websites and
businesses. Hacked websites are often used to direct traffic to malicious sites, to steal credit card
information and in some cases to even infect the visitor’s computers.

Additionally, hosting phishing pages on hacked websites has become an increasingly popular tactic to
steal credentials of third-party services.

Meanwhile, E-commerce websites are often targeted to inject websites with JavaScript based keyloggers
to steal credit card details of online shoppers.

While gaining access to one small website might not be too valuable, exploiting a popular plugin
can give the attacker access to hundreds of thousands or even to millions of sites with a single
coordinated attack.

Community powered website security

The developer’s community backing the open source projects like WordPress is strong and growing fast.
Patchstack is now set on a mission to build a strong community of security researchers behind such
popular projects too.

Patchstack ecosystem is combined of three services

Patchstack Platform - A SaaS product to automatically detect and patch third-party code vulnerabilities
within websites.

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