Understanding Hackers: Life as a WordPress Security Researcher

Are you curious how hackers exploit vulnerabilities to backdoor their way into WordPress sites? And do you want to know what you can do to protect your site from them? As a security researcher, I spend day in and day out looking for vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes to responsibly disclose them to their developers so that the vulnerabilities can get patched before malicious threat actors discover them.

In this presentation, Chloe will show you what it’s like to be an ethical hacker trying to find vulnerabilities before malicious threat actors do. She will show you how hackers find vulnerabilities in WordPress code and provide advice on what you can do to protect your site against malicious threat actors looking to exploit these vulnerabilities.

When you leave this session, you will better understand why your WordPress site may be targeted by malicious threat actors, how hackers find and exploit these vulnerabilities, and what you can do to further secure your WordPress site.

What You’ll learn

• The difference between ethical vs. unethical hacking
• What a WordPress vulnerability looks like
• Different types of threat actors
• Who & why they target your WordPress site
• 3 MOST common WordPress site intrusion vectors
• How to protect against WordPress plugin and theme vulnerabilities