Sucuri specialists submitted a report on hacking trends in 2018. Analysts concluded that WordPress was the most hacked CMS of the year, accounting for 90% of such attacks. Magento (4.6%), Joomla (4.3%) and Drupal (3.7%) follow by a huge margin.Experts write that most hacks are still associated with vulnerabilities not in the CMS themselves , but with misconfiguration, as well as vulnerabilities in plugins and themes that administrators often forget to update. Thus, only 56% of the sites studied by analysts worked with current software versions.
Oddly enough, being the “most hacked” WordPress is not the most poorly updated CMS. On the contrary, Sucuri writes that only 36% of hacked sites were working with outdated versions of WordPress, while hacking PrestaShop, OpenCart, Joomla or Magento almost guarantees that the problem lay in outdated software.
Having successfully compromised a resource, attackers usually infect it with a backdoor (68% of cases). In second place (56%) are sites that, after being hacked, are used to host various malware. In third place, with a small margin, is SEO spam (51%), which has increased significantly compared to 2017 (then its share was 44%). Basically, SEO spam is based on .htaccess redirects, PHP and database injections. As you might guess, spam is used to “poison” search results, promote and monetize various resources associated with attackers (we can talk about various blackhat tactics, as well as regular marketing).