Over the past several months, security researchers have documented wave after wave of attacks against the software that powers ordinary business websites. A single flawed form plugin for WordPress left hundreds of thousands of sites exposed to remote code execution, while a popular backup and migration plugin installed on more than three million websites carried a weakness of the same severity. By midsummer, one estimate placed the number of vulnerable WordPress sites in the tens of millions. These were not exotic targets. They were the websites of accounting firms, medical practices, dealerships, and distributors, organizations that had quietly assumed their website was a marketing asset rather than a piece of infrastructure that attackers actively hunt.
That assumption is the real vulnerability. In my years at ComSolutions, I have lost count of how many environments I have walked into where the website was built by one vendor, hosted by a second, and connected to the company's internal systems by nobody in particular. When a plugin vulnerability turns that site into a foothold, the damage rarely stays confined to a defaced homepage. The same server often holds customer records, submitted forms, and credentials that open doors deeper into the network. Attackers understand this, which is exactly why content management systems remain among their favorite targets.
I still remember the afternoon a client called about a website that seemed slow, only for us to discover a script quietly siphoning customer data in the background. Nothing on the surface looked broken. The site had been running unpatched for two years because everyone assumed someone else was maintaining it. Experiences like that have shaped how I think about web development, and they are why I wince whenever a business treats its website as a design project that ends at launch.
The lesson from this year's attacks is that security has to be designed into a website from the beginning and owned continuously afterward. Businesses that approach web development purely as a graphic design exercise end up with a site that nobody patches, backs up, or monitors. When development and ongoing IT support live under one roof, the website receives the same discipline as every other business system: hardened hosting, controlled administrative access, routine updates, tested backups, and a technician who notices when something behaves strangely.
The current rush toward AI-generated websites makes this more urgent, not less. It has never been easier to launch a polished site in an afternoon, and a growing share of small businesses are doing exactly that. But a site that nobody maintains becomes a liability that compounds quietly in the background. Speed to launch means very little if the platform underneath is abandoned a year later, and I have watched too many bargain builds turn into expensive remediation projects.
If your website was built a few years ago and you cannot name the person responsible for updating it, that is the place to start. Ask who holds administrative access, when the core software and its plugins were last patched, where the backups live, and whether a restore has ever actually been tested. Those questions are uncomfortable precisely because they matter. A website should be an asset that earns trust for your business, and with clear ownership and the right support behind it, that is exactly what it will be.
