Heads up computer lovers, today we bring you an interesting subject, 7 easiest ways to deface or hack a website. Having a website usually entails having constant worries about its protection and safety. What does Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and Microsoft all have in common? They have all been hacked. That is certainly the primary concern of website owners, no matter of the size or the influence of the site.
Based on Netcraft’s Web Server Survey for September 2015 there are 892,743,625 websites currently in the word. Most of these sites have only one worry, to stay online and protected from the growing number of hackers. There are about 30,000 websites hacked every day, according to 2012 Sophos Security Threat Report.
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This term “hacking” is something that M.I.T engineers in the 1950s and 1960s first came up trying to describe a computer system attack. During the 90s, the term “hacker” described a programmer who was experienced in machine code and operating systems. These programmers could always hack into a system to solve a problem, but some of them also became “crackers” meaning that they use their knowledge to perform computer sabotage.
Today’s sites get attacked to obtain certain benefits: stealing user information, Black Hat search engine optimization, set up a spam mail server, spreading malware, to use the site for other attacks and in the end just for fun or bragging rights.
Platforms that are mostly under attack are WordPress, Joomla, osCommerce, Magento and Zen Cart. They are attractive to hacker’s cause because of their large number of users.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s “The Growing Hacking Threat to Websites: An Ongoing Commitment to Web Application Security” four out of five sites are vulnerable, and you’ll agree it is a big number considering the number of sites we have mentioned earlier. It is important to know how to protect your data, that’s why you should read our article 7 ways of protecting your privacy online, but if you do get attacked you certainly want to know in what way. That is the main reason we listed 7 easiest ways to deface or hack a website.
Before we start with our list, we must state that the methods we listed can be ranked differently from the different people; the amount of skill a hacker possesses determines the possibility to perform a certain method. Next, different methods produce different types of damage to the website, making the possibility to rank the methods more difficult. The data that impacts our list the most is the overall amount of websites being hacked by the specific method; we listed the methods by the popularity, and the rate of success of the method.
7. Cookie Poisoning
Cookie poisoning is the conversion of a cookie by the hacker for the purpose of getting information about the user, and stealing their identity. The attacker could use the information to access all of the user accounts.
To protect your website from cookie poisoning, you should use some protection, for example encryption, in time, before they attack your computer and harm your database.
6. Cross-Site Scripting Attacks
Also known as an XSS attack, Cross Site Scripting happens when a malicious application bypasses the site validation. Once it’s activated, it makes users think that that compromised page is legitimate. It allows the hacker to manipulate that page and to visitors it is shown like a login screen.
This attack was discovered in WordPress 4.2 and it allowed the attacker to compromise a site through comments. If you want to test for XSS vulnerability, you can try Web Vulnerability Scanner. It can tell you which URLs or script could be vulnerable so you can fix them on time. The largest websites ever been affected by XSS attacks are FBI, EBay, CNN, Apple, Microsoft, and AOL.
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5. Clickjacking Attacks
Clickjacking is an attack by a hacker in which he uses blurred layers to cheat a user into clicking the first layer. The attacker is making you click on the page where he wants you to be while you are not aware of what exactly is happening.
For example, he can make you believe that you are typing a password for a bank account, but you are typing in an invisible box controlled by a hacker. Clickjacking is also known as UI Redressing, and IFRAME overlay can affect Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
4. Brute-force Attack
Brute-force attack works just by guessing your username and password, and the goal is to find the equivalent combination. As you may guess, weak passwords are easy to guess, that’s why everyone recommends you always use complicated passwords.
You can secure your website from this attack, just by blocking IP addresses that are taking too many resources from the server, by using multi-factor authentication, and of course by using strong passwords.
A brute-force attack is one of the easiest ways to deface or hack a website, and it is often used to get into WordPress installations.
3. Code Injection
If websites lack validation, they could be the next subject of code injection. This happens when code gets injected into a program or application with the aim of changing the course of accomplishment. They can be fatal for the website; they can totally destroy it or steal valuable user information.
This injection flaw occurs when an application sends some unverified data to the receiver. These flaws are often to be found in SQL, XPath, LDAP or NoSQL queries; XML parsers, OS commands, SMTP Headers, program arguments, etc. You can find them by scanners and fuzzers.
2. DDoS Attack – Distributed Denial of Service Attack
The most infamous kind of attack is the DOS attack. Any hacker can bombard the user’s website with a lot of requests, and cause the server to crash. They are used to take down a website, and it can also attack your email account.
When your system fails, the hacker continues to compromise the entire site or some functions that they need. If this attack hits your website, you need to recover as soon as you can. This is the most frequently used method for hacking.
If an attacker is unable to gain access to a machine, they will most probably just crash the machine to accomplish a denial of service attack, this one of the most used methods for website hacking.
1. SQL Injection
This method is the most used by hackers and among the easiest ways to deface or hack a website. SQL injection is used to get the user account and remove information from his database. This attack aims at user information using lines of code of SQL (Structured Query List) which is a database programming language. Hackers don’t have to learn the language at all because there is a software called “Havij” available on hackers’ forums that is developed in Iran and is free of cost.
It is used to exploit the database behind the website, application or a system and it’s very easy to use.
