I have had two WordPress blogs hacked into in the past. That was at a time when I was doing very little internet marketing, and until I found time to address the situation (months later), these sites were penalised in the search engines. They were not removed, but the rankings were reduced.
Let me shoot a couple of scare tactics your way since scare tactics seem to be what compels some people to take fix hacked wordpress site a bit more seriously, or at least start considering the problem.
No software system is resistant to vulnerabilities and bugs. Security holes will be found and guys will do their best to exploit them. Keeping your software up-to-date is a good way to stave off attacks, because software sellers will fix their products once security holes are found.
You also need to place the"Anyone Can Register" in Settings/General to away, and you ought to have some sort of spam plugin. Akismet is the old standby, the one I use, but there are many of them these days.
BACK UP your website regularly and keep a copy on your own computer and storage. Back, if you have a very active site. You spend a lot of money and Extra resources time on your site, do not skip this! The one solution that does it all is BackupBuddy, no back up your files, widgets, plugins and database. Need to move your site this will do it!
Implementing all of the above will take less than an hour to finish, while making your WordPress site considerably more immune to intrusions. Over 1 million WordPress websites were cracked last year, mainly due to easily preventable safety gaps. Have yourself prepared and you're likely to be on the safe side.