Why hackers want to hack your website?

It is quite easy and cheap for a hacker to buy malware. Harder is to spread it. This where your website comes in as a convenient platform to infect your customers computers. A lot of website hacking occurs because unmaintained software. Once the website has been compromised, it causes a huge reputation loss for your company. Clean up is always messy too, since there could be infectious code hidden in real website files. Your site will be deindexed by Google as insecure website. Clean up and recovery takes time, while you lose valuable business.

If you sell something on your site, it is a obvious target for a hacker. Even if you don’t store any payment details on your site, there are still tools what can be installed to capture your customer’s credit card details while they enter them.

For example e-mail and password used on your site, can most likely be also used on another site. People don’t always have different passwords. All kind of email lists and customer data can be sold if not to others, then maybe to customer itself.

Search engine optimization helps Google and other search engines to rank your website. Links from to another website mean an upvote for search engine. If your website has good reputation, link from your website can be valuable.

Hacked sites can be used to display advertising suitable for a hacker and thus they earn money from that. Smart hackers won’t show ads to you, but your customers, so you might not even suspect a thing. Commonly they advertise scam or products they can’t easily advertise otherwise (e.g gambling, adult sites, supplements and toys or just plain scam sites).

Sometimes hackers are after your server (website hosting providers) resources. For example to mine cryptocurrency. This can make your website painfully slow or web hosting closing your website.

Perhaps your competition doesn’t like you and want to get rid of you or damage your business. Perhaps you bruised someone’s ego (it is sometimes very easy to do accidently). Maybe you didn’t do business with someone or expressed opinion what differed to someone’s else world view. Whatever the case, hacking unmaintained website can be very easy way to damage your reputation.

Sometimes hackers really don’t understand the damage they do. For them it is just a fun game not really understanding the cause and effect, since they can’t really see the other party suffering, though we have fair share of naturally or environment influenced mean people who enjoy the chaos.