Google: 760,000 Websites Hacked – Warning

WordPress Security ProtectionMisleading WordPress Hack Statistics

While this article on ZDNet makes WordPress sound weak, It’s important to know that the WordPress core has never been hacked. There statement “Nearly 50 percent of hijacked sites in the study were running on WordPress” is quite misleading.

Other than the alarming use of statistics, this is a very interesting article.

Google warns 760,000 websites: ‘You’ve been hijacked’ – but many are infected again in days

Google seeks a balance between tough warnings and a helping hand when fixing up hijacked websites that may harm its users.

Google is urging website operators to sign up for its security notifications after a study of 760,935 hijacked websites revealed the difficulties in cleaning up infections that expose visitors to malware.

Google details its findings in a study it conducted with the University of California, Berkeley, which looked at the hijacked websites it found in an 11-month period to June 2014.

The sites were identified through Google Safe Browsing, which notifies browser users of a potentially harmful site, and Search Quality, which flags risky sites in search results.

The study looked at the most effective way to communicate the issue to website operators, and whether operators had the technical knowhow to resolve it.

The researchers found that website operators who’d registered their site with Search Console, and would thus receive an email directly from Google, performed best, with 75 percent recovering a compromised webpage after notification.

Browser and search warnings alone led respectively to 54 percent and 43 percent of sites being cleaned up.

The researchers also found that 80 percent… Read the entire article on ZDNet

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