Sectigo’s Research Mentions “Websites Gets Attacked 172 Times A Day”

Internet News March 24th 2022

Websites face cyberattacks 172 times a day which means 8 times per minute. According to the new research conducted by Sectigo – a global provider of digital certificate and automated Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM), states that the Non-Content Management System (CMS) sites are 39 times more prone to attacks than WordPress. Cyberattacks of all types especially automated ones are on the rise for SMBs, this is mostly due to an increase in bot traffic.

Small and Medium size businesses (SMBs) are struggling with bot traffic that is now accounted for 5.5 times more than human traffic in 2021, that is as compared to 2020. It is seen that around 2,306 bot visits websites per week. This is why the number of human visitors has reduced which indicates that criminal actors are scaling their attacks and targeting unsuspecting SMB website owners with the help of bots.

Jason Soroko, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of PKI at Sectigo said, the legitimate reasons for bots to visit sites are like search engine crawlers and copyright scans, but now bots are also used for various nefarious purposes. Malicious bots are programmed to visit sites using commands so that they identify vulnerabilities in code to execute their attacks like stealing data or inserting malware.

He further added that in actuality the public internet is a very dangerous place and is rapidly getting worse. We can’t ignore the fact that – SMB websites have enormous value to bad actors because they have customers’ data that can be used for phishing attacks. It is not just limited to frauds. If in case the website handles payments, then it’s an obvious target. The content management system platforms may not protect SMBs from such attacks. In fact, they are very difficult to secure.

Mr. Soroko added that SiteLock’s new data highlights the importance of having a comprehensive website security solution in place. So that it will be able to protect these kinds of threats and can establish digital trust in the increasing data world. He said, even well-established and resourced websites become victims of such attacks. From 2022 onwards, specialized security has become a necessity and not a luxury.

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Security Protection and Monitoring of Websites 

SiteLock, Sectigo’s website security and protection and monitoring provider conducted research, where the SiteLock Annual Website Security Report for 2022 examines the present state of website security and also forecasts for 2021. SiteLock performed research on over 14 million websites in order to find the cyber dangers that businesses nowadays suffer.

 It also mentioned that the threat environment is continuously developing with successful cyber threats like Filehacker (35% of infected websites with malware contains Filehacker) and Backdoor assaults are now coming into focus (31% of websites contains backdoor). Some additional findings of the study include:

• 93% of the infected websites with malware are still not blacklisted. That means, 9 out of 10 websites are missed by search engines.
  
• Plugins crash WordPress vulnerabilities. The risk of attack is almost doubled for every five plugins on the website.
  
• Worldwide 4.1million websites are currently estimated to have been infected by malware.
  
• 48% (nearly half) of SMB website owners still believe that they are too small to get targeted, even though half of them have been breached.

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