Rather and a targeted malicious attack on your website or company reputation there are webbots that trawl the web looking for websites and automatically testing and and using security breaches in the code. As WordPress is so widely used then it is a very real target for hackers.
There is a constant list of updates for WordPress and its plug ins and its easy to let these slide for a few weeks or months and then worry that they might "break things" when they are applied so there is genuine concern and caution when applying updates. So the vulnerabilities of such sites increase over time.
It is one of our biggest single call for support, my site is not working, has it been hacked, what has changed? Or even worse the server auto closes a website due to illegal operation such as scripts running endlessly and affecting the smooth running of the server. Its these times our engineers are confronted with an unhappy customer who is frustrated and concerned and an unplanned for re organisation of our working priorities.
So what is the answer?
Better security for the website simple as that. Whilst ssl protects the site visitor and passwords and ftp locks protect the websites hosting control, there is little protection for the WordPress site itself.
Wordfence is a very capable plug in for wordpress BUT it does need monitoring and action on its reports and it is very much a tool to be used to help protect a site than a complete package in security.
Webspace Unlimited have been looking at alternatives for our clients and believe that Sucuri would be beneficial to any and all clients who have WordPress sites. This is control panel access of the web hosting environment, it is real time monitoring and a guaranteed fix time for a compromised site, we have enabled the security on the servers and will be updating with pricing details soon.