Depending on who you are, the answer may vary.

Hacking into a computer system for malicious intentions is nothing new. Since the eighties, hackers have used their knowledge to break into systems, often without any reason. However, with the attendance of web based applications, the hacking attacks have dramatically increased. Nowadays, most of the attacks are predominantly automated and therefore affect a large number of website owners.

An attack can be random, sometimes just out of boredom and amusement, protest or peerpressure. An attack can also be planned: these attacks are intended to collect info or to use your resources. The most obvious reason is economic gain, or when referring to resources, they will use your bandwidth and physical server resources.

The effects of these attacks may vary according to the type and target of the attack:

• The website can be hacked to serve spam and malicious files, or can be programmed to attack other websites.
• The database can be explored to gather financial or personal information,  to be used for credit card fraud or identity theft.
• Denial of service attacks can cause a disruption in web services. These attacks attempt to make a server or network unavailable to its visitors. Your website can receive the attacks or can be used to attack another server.

These attacks happen more often than you think. Google agrees they blacklist close to 10.000 sites a day for malware and flag over 20.000 sites for phishing every month.

Taking this into account, there are various things you can do to reduce the risk. But remember, security is not about risk elimination, but risk reduction. The risk will never be zero.

You can, however, install tools to reduce where you can or update specific plugins where needed.