WordPress powers ~43% of all websites — which makes it the #1 target for attackers. If your site is online, it's being probed automatically every few minutes by bots looking for known weaknesses.
What attackers are after
- Spam injection — your site sends pharmacy spam without your knowledge, ruining your search ranking
- SEO poisoning — invisible links to gambling/casino sites added to your pages
- Crypto miners — your visitors' CPUs hijacked to mine cryptocurrency
- Card skimmers — on WooCommerce sites, malicious JS that captures customer card data
- Ransomware — files encrypted and held for ransom
- Botnet conscription — your server used to attack others (your IP gets blacklisted)
- Phishing pages — copies of bank login pages hosted on your domain
Why DIY security is hard
You'd need to track:
- New vulnerabilities in 60,000+ WP plugins (CVEs published daily)
- Failed login attempts vs legitimate user errors
- File modifications across hundreds of WordPress core files
- Outbound connections to known malware C2 servers
- Backup integrity and offsite storage rotation
PowerSEC does all of this automatically and alerts you only when something needs your attention.
What's at stake
A compromised WordPress site can cost:
- Brand reputation — Google flags your site as "deceptive"
- Customer trust — abandoned carts, refund requests
- Search ranking — months of SEO work undone in days
- Money — incident response costs, lost revenue, possible legal liability
The good news: prevention is much cheaper than recovery.