Over one third of all webpages on the Internet are powered by one of these four key open source platforms: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.
This makes life of hackers much easier as they can simply focus on exploiting vulnerabilities on a platform of them, or one of the most popular plugins and extensions they use.
Sucuri, a security company focused on detecting online attacks and restoring compromised websites, recently launched fresh statistics on hacked websites.
Based on Incident Response Team reports and Malware Research Team of the company, in the first quarter of this year, 78% of successful compromises were on websites with WordPress. Websites using Joomla reached 14%, Magento 5%, and Drupal 2%.
E-commerce sites using Magento were hit with exploits that allowed remote code execution in February 2015, and an XSS hole that can lead to infringement of the online store in January 2016. Obviously, not all admins update their installations regularly.
In fact, webmasters with Magento are the worst of their kind: 97% of Magento installations, according to Sucuri experts, were old versions at the time of cleaning. WordPress admins on the other hand were better, since "only" 56 percent of the installations were in an older version:
"The top three software vulnerabilities that affected most websites in the first quarter were through the RevSlider, GravityForms and TimThumb plugins," the researchers said.
"For all three of these plugins there was a fix available for at least a year, while for TimThumb it existed many years ago (since 2011).
The problem with RevSlider, in particular, is that it is built into WES themes, and many of the platform users do not even know they use it.
Magento websites are usually infringed by information leaked to customers.
For the remaining platforms, SEO Spam (31%, and this percentage continues to increase), drive-by-download infections (60%), hacking tools (exploit or DDoS tools), and phishing. Defacements by hacktivists were barely noticed.
In two-thirds of cases, Sucuri's cleaning team discovered backdoors on websites, as attackers wanted to be confident that they could gain access after cleaning the hacked site.
"On average, we clean up 132 files per hacked website," say the researchers.
"This shows how deeply embedded it can be malicious software within a website. The above also explains why Google reports a 30% re-infection rate, a rate measured through webmaster tools.”
Here we have to mention that WordPress sites, although they first come in the rate of infections for us can be considered the most reliable. Of course, always be in the latest update.
