92% of all WordPress attacks are on Israeli sites - report
The report also found that Israeli sites of all types were targeted far more often than those of any other country during the last quarter.
By ZEV STUB(photo credit: PIXABAY)
A whopping 92% of all brute-force hacking attacks on WordPress sites around the world in the last few months were targeted at Israeli sites, according to a report by Internet security company F5 Labs.The report also found that Israeli sites of all types were targeted far more often than those of any other country during the last quarter.The study was based on an analysis of more than a million honeypot-logged connections collected by F5’s research partner, Effluxio, during the third quarter of 2020. About 180,000 attacks against Israel were identified during the period. The United States was a distant second, with about 130,000 attacks, followed by Russia at 75,000 and India and the Czech Republic with 50,000 attacks.More than 7,000 brute-force attacks targeted Israeli WordPress site administrative portals with the /wp-login.php URL. By comparison, only a few hundred were recorded against American sites, and no more than 100 against any other country.“The target paths in the data show no particular association with Israeli systems or organizations,” the company said. “We can only speculate about the bigger objectives of attackers looking for Israeli WordPress sites to compromise – they could be geopolitical adversaries looking to get a foothold inside the country to launch further attacks against Israel or its allies, or they could be actors with zero interest in Israel who are looking to misdirect attention.”Nevertheless, the report continued, “given the sophistication and reputation of the Israeli cybersecurity community, it is a good reminder that even Israel has easy targets like this. Every pool has a shallow end, and every place has assets that are either difficult to secure or poorly managed, or in the case of WordPress, often both.”WordPress is the most popular content-management system in the world, powering an estimated 35% of all websites on the Internet.
