I've had two WordPress blogs hacked into formerly. That was in a time when I was doing almost no online marketing, and until I found time to deal with the situation (weeks later), these sites were penalized at the major search engines. They were not eliminated, however the ratings were reduced.
Cloning your website is another level in repair hacked wordpress site that can be useful. Cloning simply means that you have backed up your site to a totally different location, (offline, as in a folder, so as to not have SEO issues ) where you can access it in a moment's notice if necessary.
No software system is resistant to bugs and vulnerabilities. Security holes will be discovered and bad men will do their best to exploit them. Keeping your software up-to-date is a good way to stave off attacks, because software vendors will mend their products once security holes are found.
Is to delete the default administrator account. This is important because if you don't do it, a user name which they could attempt to crack is known by malicious user.
BACK UP your site and keep image source a copy on your computer and storage. For those who have a very active website, back up daily. You spend a whole lot of time and money on your site, don't skip this! Is BackupBuddy, no back up plugins, widgets, your documents and database. Need to move your site to another server, this will do it in less than a couple of minutes!
The plugin should be updated to remain current with the latest WordPress release, play nice with of your plugins and have WordPress and restore capabilities. The ability to clone your website (in addition to regular backups) can be helpful if you ever need to do an offline website redesign, among other things.