Kathy Zant - Why Hackers Target Small Business Websites
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Often people ask why hackers are targeting their seemingly unexciting small business websites. And yet, these smaller websites are often receiving the brunt of malicious attacks.
Hackers understand economies of scale. As such, smaller WordPress sites are always under attack by bots looking for signs of vulnerability. Fortunately, there are a number of easy ways to protect your site by making good security decisions.
We’ll go through some of the most common methods hackers use to get into WordPress sites through some entertaining (and sometimes scary) stories.
You’ll learn key security principles to help you make good decisions to prevent intrusions, detect them, and recover from a security event if you are ever compromised.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Kathy Zant is an internationally recognized speaker on security, marketing, and data-driven website development. She’s spoken at countless events worldwide, both online and on stage, and she’s been an organizer for both WordCamp Phoenix (twice) and WordCamp US. A frequent guest on numerous podcasts about WordPress and emerging technologies, she is also co-host of The Kadence Beat, Do the Woo, and WPMotivate, and is a frequent co-host on This Week in WordPress. An Executive Producer of Open, the open-sourced documentary about the WordPress community, she is passionate about your stories and believes everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.
SUMMARY
Kathy Zant gave a comprehensive presentation on WordPress security. Some key points:
Hackers target small businesses because they expect less security compared to large companies. Automated scripts scan for vulnerabilities across many sites.
A recent vulnerability in the Bricks page builder was being actively exploited. Hackers look for easily exploitable issues to compromise many sites quickly.
Common intrusion methods include software vulnerabilities, poor password security like reuse, and compromising the hosting server/control panel which can then infect multiple sites.
Risks for small businesses include data breaches, PCI non-compliance fines, and reputation damage. 60% of small businesses fail within 6 months of a breach.
Proactive security like regular audits, backups, updates and incident response planning leads to better business outcomes like increased sales and profits.
Unique, complex passwords and two-factor authentication are critical. Passkeys are a promising new authentication method.
Principle of least privilege - give users only necessary access levels.
Keep all software updated, including plugins, themes, core, browsers. Remove unused plugins/themes.
Backups must be tested and stored securely off-server. Assume on-server backups are compromised in a hack.
Use a security plugin like Solid Security for file monitoring, passkeys and more. Cloudflare provides security and performance benefits.
Compromised devices can lead to cookie/session theft - keep computers patched. Isolate sites and functionality when possible.
Regular audits every 3 months can catch new vulnerabilities. Resources like newsletters and YouTube were recommended for ongoing education.
Read more at https://westorlandowp.org/kathy-zant-...
RESOURCES
Website: https://www.zant.com/
Slides and Checklist: https://www.zant.com/fl-meetup
Newsletter: https://kathyzant.com/
Documentary: https://open.film/
YouTube: / @kathyzant
Podcasts:
https://www.kadencewp.com/podcast/
https://dothewoo.io/
https://wpmotivate.com/
https://wpbuilds.com/2022/08/23/this-...
Follow:
/ kathyzant
https://x.com/kathyzant
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