Why Do Hackers Hack?

Seriously, why? When someone hacks your website, it’s like having somebody break into your car or your house. 

Once, somebody broke into my house. We came back from vacation, and we walked into the house. My oldest daughter, who was two at the time, goes, “Mama, where TV go?” I look over, and sure enough,  no TV there. You know what else was gone? All the beer in our fridge. Somebody stole our beer, our TV and my husband’s Big 12 championship ring, which was a real stinking bummer. We felt gross, violated and a little unsafe. 

That’s how you feel, with a gigantic dollop of irritation plopped on top, when somebody hacks your stinking website. Then, adding insult to injury, you have to pay somebody to fix your site so you can use it again. 

Why are they doing it anyway? Why do hackers hack?

There are two main ways they would do this. 

1. Your hacked website would install a program on your computer called malware that scrapes your computer and gathers the information the hackers want, then sends it back to the hackers. They might steal anything from usernames and passwords to credit card information.
   
   Fortunately you can install all kinds of things on your computer to find and report malware. Install them. Malwarebytes is the one we use. A service like this can keep your information safer.
   
2. Phishing. This is when hackers send you to a fraudulent website that looks like a website you could probably trust. Then they ask you to do something like: your social security number, money, reset your password or username.
   
   I’ve seen phishers replicate the look of Amazon or PayPal sites and ask visitors to “login” to reset their password. Then you put in your username and password and click submit, and it sends it to them. Oh, it’s painful. 

You’ll need to use your keen detective skills to avoid these bandits.
Start by examining the URL at the top of your screen and make sure it 100% matches the URL a hacker could be impersonating. I’ve seen this done with Amazon and PayPal. Regardless of what page I’m viewing on the Amazon website the URL is almost always starts with “amazon.com” they do not send me to a url like amazon.passwordreset.com. That is not an Amazon domain. That domain is “passwordreset.com”. The real domain starts after the “.”.  I’m going to stop with the examples now before I go too deep into this and bore you to death. Just remember the main URL should be EXACTLY what you’re used to seeing. 

Ultimately, these types of hackers are hacking to get your information, either by installing a program on your computer to scrape it and send data back to them or sending you to a fraudulent website and tricking you into sending them the information.

They basically inject links all over your website. 

It’s gross. 

Most of the time, we notice these things because they’re not in English. I actually had a client’s website get hacked in just this way. They were a pharmaceutical company for animals. So, the hacker injected these really technical-looking words all over their website, but we didn’t notice them at first because they didn’t seem out of place. There are a lot of technical terms non-English feeling words on their website. We were updating a page and came across a really weird word we’d never seen before. It was a hacker injected link leading back to the hacker’s website. 

Hackers do this because backlinks (links from one website to another) are a way to build credibility with Google. They’ll hack a website and then link back to their website. Ultimately, they’re showing Google more websites are linking to them, and they think they will get more search traffic from it. You’d think Google would have thwarted this already, but no.

All the websites we build are constructed using a language called PHP, and PHP has the ability, with the help of the server, to send emails. These hackers hack into the websites and place a script in the site that sends emails out. They’re spamming, and they’re hacking. How gross is that? It’s like a double threat. I do not like these people. 

The bummer about all of this is these hackers are really smart. When they just inject links, that’s pretty simple, and you can go in, delete some stuff and clean it up, and things will be okay. 

However, when they’re sending out emails, they’ve set up your website to install malware in such a way it often replicates itself. It is the darndest thing, like an actual virus, and you have to go out and find it in all these little compartments of the website and clean it up. Most of the time, it keeps manifesting itself to the point you have to go back in time and get a copy of the website that’s clean and replace it. Otherwise, it keeps perpetuating itself and growing. It’s so smart. 

Imagine if these crazy smart hackers actually put energy into doing good things for the world. How much better the world would be, right? It would be an amazing place.

Bonus: Hackers hack to make a statement. 

Literally, they’ll hack a website and turn it into a porn site. Some groups go out and hack websites to prove a point, not just for pornography, but to prove a point politically or make a statement.  They hijack your site just because they can, which is gross and annoying.

So there you go, a not-so-fun bonus reason why they do it. 

Remember, hackers usually hack for one of these reasons. 

1. They want to steal your information. 
2. They want to promote their own website. 
3. They want to send emails.
4. They want to make a statement. 

And now you know the answer to the universe’s deepest, darkest secret: why hackers hack. 

Now that you know the WHY, learn how to protect your site from hackers in our recent post: The Number One Thing YouNeed To Do To Protect Your Website From Hackers.