If you are anything like most business owners, the security of your company’s web site is often the last thing on your mind. As long as your web site provides your customers the information and services they require, that’s good enough, right? Wrong! Hackers are pernicious, and the two most common web publishing platforms, WordPress and Joomla!, tend to have security problems that hackers can exploit. So it becomes very important for you to know how to secure WordPress and Joomla websites.
The popularity of WordPress and Joomla can not be overstated. Even this publication, TechSagar, is powered by WordPress. These web publishing platforms, known as Content Management Systems (CMS), give tremendous control to organizations without requiring in-depth knowledge of HTML or web programming. They also come with a wide variety of themes, allowing the pages to be customized and made to look quite attractive without the need for complicated HTML and CSS coding.
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There is a growing problem with the security of websites, though, and several high profile hacking attacks have proved just how valuable your customer’s data is and the measures cyber criminals are willing to go to in order to steal that data. Sometimes, these attacks are meant for financial gain, but 2011 also saw an increase of the attacks of “hacktivists,” hackers who only wanted to disrupt the operations of web sites for mischief, not necessarily for financial gain.
Not even Microsoft is safe from hackers. When the official Microsoft Office blogs switched from Telligent to WordPress, they were quickly hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. As the infographic below, provided to us by the fine people at WhoIsHostingThis, shows, hundreds of thousands of websites running WordPress and Joomla are attacked each year, making it clear how important it is to keep up with the latest security updates for these web publishing platforms.
