As most of our readers are involved with technology and their faith at some capacity, we need to be aware of what all is going on with our websites. We talk about security constantly and with the state of online hacking, it looks like we will be talking about it for a lot longer.
The tradition way hackers make money is that they find a website and hack in to steal your database, they send a trojan horse image that will capture your login information, or brute force their way on to your server and take everything.
Those incidents hurt you the individual or organization directly. They steal directly from you. But security analysts found a new way hackers are trying to make money that actually hurts your audience instead of the website or server being hacked.
Is Your Church Website Safe?
TheRegister.co.uk reported how a major website from the media giant CBS was hacked and had JavaScript inserted into their site. But no virus detection software would identify it because it was not there to destroy or take your information. Instead, the mission of the script was when your computer was idle, to mine for crypto-currency. Yes, it will end up costing you money because your website is running extra hard so you are going to be using a lot of electricity.
If you are like me, you’d go onto a website to watch a show or movie, hit pause on that video and not come back to it for 15 minutes up to a couple of days. This script would then run up to 90% of your process to gain the hackers money.
Your utility bill will be higher, but your photos will be safe and your bank account will remain secure. I get the sense that these are lower brow hacks as I cannot imagine they are making billions, but crypto-currency is a hacker’s dream for money as it’s designed to be untraceable and no one is going to come running to an individual to investigate an international crime. Much less risk compared to taking out the world’s largest financial creditor or a tech retail giant.
This makes me wonder, if churches don’t update their website or make sure they are using proper security, are they even going to know their website is hacking every visitor if they get compromised?
Speak your mind...