What is the danger of hacking a website

Consequences of hacking

Loss of control over the site. The consequence may be not only the appearance of suspicious content on your site, for which it may fall under the filters of search engines. Having received logins and passwords of accounts with administrator rights, hackers are able to completely block access to the control panel for the rightful owners and demand a ransom for the return of control over the site.

Capture of user personal data. If we are talking exclusively about the login, password or correspondence of users, then the consequences are not so terrible. It is much worse when attackers get into the hands of the payment data of site visitors.

Use of site resources for spam mailing. Hackers usually send a series of emails from the site, which are accompanied by malicious code that can infect a PC with Trojan programs when they are opened. Most often in such mailings we are talking about a cash prize, an offer of a highly paid position or a requirement to pay a fine accrued by the state, which the user for some reason did not know or forgot about.

Hosting phishing pages.

It is used to steal the details of users’ bank cards by simulating the pages of various popular services (social networks, e-commerce, banking services). A fake “phishing” page posted on a hacked site is almost indistinguishable from the real one. But, all the financial data entered into it when paying, instantly fall into the hands of intruders.

Attacks on adjacent resources. Hackers use hacked sites to download scripts that allow them to infect other resources. Such sites can also be used as botnet proxy servers in massive DDoS attacks.

Mobile redirects. Hackers can install a code on the site that automatically redirects the user to pages with paid subscriptions. For the presence of such a code on the resource, it can be blocked by search engine filters, marking it as a source of “hidden redirection” or “aggressive advertising”.

Navigating to infected pages. Usually, such attacks are configured for the vulnerability of a specific operating system or a specific software version. First, a simple virus file is uploaded to the site. Subsequently, the user downloads this file and when it is launched, malware is installed that infects all paired devices.

Loss of search positions. Redirects, suspicious content, spam mailings not only reduce the traffic to the resource, but also nullify all efforts to promote it. It takes a lot of financial and time labor to return the site to its previous positions.