If you use Wordpress for your blog, please read this.

[Trackrig]

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Bill

[1492]

In a recent 60 minutes episode, it was reported that up to 97% of companies experience a breach. Many who work in IT know that there is no sure fire way to prevent it. It's more a matter of when, not if. Even the NSA gets hacked. It's a dynamic process, and the best you can do is to try and stay one step ahead of hackers.

Compounding the issue is that many companies don't invest in an adequate recovery system until they get seriously compromised. In which case, you end up with cases such as a local law enforcement agency paying East European hackers a bounty to decrypt their evidence files due to malware, as happened to one small department in PA.

Wordpress has had vulnerabilities in the past that have allowed a couple of serious exploits. But so has other popular CMS/Blogging apps such as Drupal, popular among large corporations and government agencies. You need to keep security patches updated, and hope that the vulnerability hasn't existed for a long period of time. Which is another issue of detecting breaches in a timely manner.

[mlts22]

Today, some hackers caused a German steel plant to be destroyed due to destroying a furnace and killing its safety shutdown mechanism.

We have turned a corner with the Sony breach. The hackers used to just slurp up info. Now they are out for blood with destroying data and physical systems.

A microcosm of this was MS-DOS viruses in the 1990s. At first, it was benign stuff that spread, then as time went on, it went to destruction of data, destroying files, even frying monitors by using different refresh rates and zeroing the firmware on machines. AV programs didn't stop this, it was people not sharing data with each other, but downloading from clean sources which did.

This is a major problem because a lot of US companies say, "security has no ROI", so they give token support at best for security. In the past, the breaches didn't affect companies in any way. The PSN breach didn't affect Sony, even after all the personal info got stolen of customers. Same with other companies, where the business lost nothing, and had minimal losses after six months to a year. Now with the activity of blackhats changing from grabbing data to active destruction, this might get businesses to change and actually bother doing more than lip service for security.

[wa8yxm]

Hackers cost the US (And the citizens thereof) more than robbers, murders, burglers and all other thieves. About the only thing more costly is War (Perhaps) and Politicians (Who, of course, decide if we go to war).

They are the terrorists of the internet and I think should be treated just like the terrorists with the suicide vest who gets disarmed first.

And before anyone says "They have not killed anyone" I will answer "Not that you know of". because I know of many systems that if hacked, people could easily DIE, and some of them have been hacked,,, But the Death was listed as other causes.

Example.. Hack the traffic control system in a city using a central computer and accidents can kill.

[Y-Guy]

I run a site for work using WordPress, great stuff. But about a year ago we got hacked, had back up's so we're up and running again. I think invested in WordFence for WordPress. I was shocked how many hacking attempts on our site were coming in. I was able to lock our site down, and know the hackers get locked out. Been a great investment for peace of mind and they do a good job keeping me in the loop about hacks, issues, updates and when a add-on is vulnerable. Honestly if you're running WordPress without something like WordFence or Sucuri you're just contributing to the problem. All host companies should be providing this service.