Every software you work with – including your content management system – regularly receives updates. What many users forget: apart from new features concerning looks and technology they mostly make the system’s security stronger.
New features, modern looks, easier handling: with each update content management systems – especially the ones based on open source technology – receive countless new elements based on the ideas of a creative community. A community consisting of people who generally also use their system of choice in their daily life and are thus even more motivated to make their tool stronger and more versatile with every new version. For this reason, it is mostly feature-related news that gets emphasized when a new release is being announced. At the same time though, another important factor remains in the shadows.
In fact, apart from all new design ideas and features there is hardly any release that does not also include security improvements or even fix security-related issues that often do not get noticed by the persons running system-based websites until the issue actually concerns their own project. At this point many problems would not have even shown if the update from last month had been installed.
How risks arise
No matter how large or important the amount of data stored on a website might be, any site may get into the focus of a hacker attack that for many different reasons aims to extract personal customer data or infect the site with malware. In order to do so there are various ways, since the reality of everyday hacker attacks has changed massively over the years. Attackers do not anymore correspond to the image of single persons planning attacks on a single particularly promising website. Instead today’s hacker attacks are mostly based on automatisms that may harm more or less any site, whether it is attractive for hackers or not.
A factor that supports this strategy is the fact that most websites in nearly all existing business sectors are nowadays based on content management systems instead of own individual web development. On the one hand, these systems have improved in terms of security and thus grown into a strong alternative for developers, companies and even most security-sensitive public institutions, such as hospitals or local authorities. On the other hand, it is this development that has made CMS even more attractive for hacker attacks. The reason: a system that is the basis of thousands of sites gives a hacker not only the possibility to inflict harm on one single project but on many at the same time. With this development, the value of security and updates has grown for all CMS development teams.
General rule that can also be applied to proprietary software: systems that are run by many millions of live sites are more likely to be attacked than systems that only attract smaller and more specific target groups. At the same time it is important to know that this is also considered by the CMS development communities who work full time in order to locate and fix security issues and make updates available as soon as possible. This way, countless zero day exploits have been prevented. Whether or not the webmasters use this development, however, is still in their own hands.
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