After recently reviewing our website data, we found it interesting that most if not all of the news media are focused on hacking by Russia only, when in fact it is a world-wide event.
If you have a website and/or email, you have definitely seen an uptick of spam email. It would seem that hackers and spammers like to welcome the holidays by increasing their junk/spam/irritating email messages. We get about 30 per each of our 6 email addresses per day. Those numbers are not so bad when you consider the total email sent out each day.
According to Talos, in the month of October, 2017, there was a daily average of legitimate email totaling 78.90 Billion, up 21.4% from September, 2017.
In the month of October, 2017, there was also a daily spam volume of 454.61 Billion, up 24% from September.
That is a lot of daily email given that according to Internet Live Stats, there are about 1.2 Billion websites. What makes the amount of email seem even larger is that about 75% of those website are “parked”, meaning inactive.
Since we have had numerous hacking attempts, we started daily monitoring our website data. From our review through our cPanel account, under “Metrics”, we found that in only 3 days, hackers have been hitting our website attempting to get through using our Word Press blog files. One type of hacking attempt can be identified by finding a specific web app attack identified with an entry ending in “wp-login.php”).
Now back to Russia. Everyone is so concerned that Russia is messing things up that they are ignoring (or not talking about other countries where hacking attempts are coming from. The countries and/or places that we identified hacking attacks are coming from included India, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, Moscow, Beijing, Algeria, Poland, Lithuania, Spain, Pakistan, New York, Sweden, Morocco, Italy, Chicago, United Emirates, Thailand, Serbia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Dallas. A number of these had multiple attacks listed over several days.
If you want to check and see who is attempting to get into the back door of your website, log into to your cPanel account, go to the Metric section, and open the “errors”. If you see any entries ending in “wp-login.php”, then you have had an attempted attack on your website.
Talk to your webmaster about screening the IP addresses and blocking them. Just be sure not to block any search engine bots that want to index your website.