This question is always relevant.
Usually, the websites’ owners often happen to have two extremes:

• “Who needs us at all?” – when they do not want to pay for updating of their website version of the engine, and maintaining of it in the actual state
• “Enemies are everywhere” – when every move is considered to be as competitors’ machinations

The truth is somewhere in between for sure. On the one hand, such a situation occurs very rarely when the website is being hacked purposefully, on request.
On the other hand, the modern updating of website components, closing the engine vulnerability allows protecting the website from mass hackings (the instructions “How to update WordPress” is here).

How do hackers hack websites?

As usual, websites are hacked en masse and automatically. For example, it turned out that the certain WordPress version has a vulnerability; one can determine thousands of websites on this engine version – and knuckle down to work to hack. Alternatively, it is possible just to find some vulnerability from the hosting company (the server, where is placed the website), figure websites that are placed here and set the process automatically.
In the first case, the timely update of the WordPress version will help to avoid of being hacked. In the second case, there is almost nothing depends on you, except for choosing the hosting company.

What are the purposes of websites’ hackings?

Many Internet users simply cannot understand how hackers achieve the profit; many believe that the hack of thousands of websites is senseless.
There are, of course, “individual” cases, but when speaking of mass hackings, usually one of the following scripts is used:

• The SPAM software is placed on a website. Sending spam, the malefactors solve some of their purposes, as a rule, commercial ones. The profit is obvious.
• Phishing pages are placed on a website. The page looks like a page of some famous bank, for example. Eventually, people will visit at least dozens of pages from thousands. Some of the visitors do not pay attention that the page is placed on some strange website – they enter their credit card’s data, for example. When we go further, everything is clear, I hope.
• The sale. They form several thousands of pages like doorways, which are oriented on low-frequency queries. As a result, they get traffic from the search engines. Further, goes the redirection to the website, which is selling the product directly or the attempt of selling on this very page.
• The traffic “surge” for another website (websites). In the easiest case, it is just a throwing of visitors from your website to another one.
• Selling of links from your website’s pages. The business of selling links is gradually stopping, but it is still alive. They place the code, which allows inserting hidden links (they are visible only when watching the page’s internal code). The malefactor places the website in the links market, earning on links placing.
• “I was here”. Sometimes it happens. The hack without any clear commercial profit. Just instead of the website’s main page, it is possible to see something like “Hacked by…”. Why? – I do not know.

These were the basic hacking motives, which we often face when working with websites (both, our customers’ ones and ours).