Recently I discovered that several of my blog sites have been hacked. To be honest, I never really considered myself to be a target for this sort of thing because it’s not as if I’m a high profile blogger. Based on what has happened to my blog sites, I reckon there are at least two, and possibly three, different hackers involved. What are the odds, huh?
Or perhaps you don’t have to be a high profile blogger to get your site hacked. Perhaps you just have to be unlucky enough. Although I managed to clean up the problem, it has left me wondering what I can do to protect my website to make sure I don’t get hacked again.
I have noticed one thing though – the blogs that I don’t update regularly are the ones that get hit. Is there a correlation there? If I’m regularly checking on my websites, does that mean I won’t get hacked again in future? Who knows?
I did a Google search on preventing hacking on wordpress blogs and found some useful articles on the topic. Because wordpress is one of the the most popular blog platforms for self-hosted blogs, I guess that is what makes it a target for hackers. I’m not sure if these tricks work, but I will definitely try them out…
Thechetan recommends changing your user name to something different from the default “admin”.
Holy Shmoly recommends keeping updated to the latest version of wordpress to protect against hackers. In addition to that, you should also change your passwords, remove any other users, change your wordpress config “secret key” and delete any malicious codes left by the hacker which may allow them to get in again in future. If you’re like me and have no idea how to find malicious scripts, Holy Shmoly also explains how you can identify and remove them.
SEM Labs offers some useful tips on how to prevent hackers from finding your blog. I guess the idea is that if they can’t find you, they can hack your blog.
Findable Blogs offers a little rundown about hackers, why they do what they do and what you can do to prevent getting hacked. This is a good article to read if your Google ranking is important to you as your ratings can be severely affected if your blog has been hacked.
Just from reviewing these few articles (there are plenty more), it appears that there is a lot you can do. Whether it is all necessary or effective, I don’t know, but I’m sure it is worth it if it keeps the hackers away…
Are you a webmaster or self-hosted blogger? Have you ever had your website hacked? What happened? How did you fix it? What measures did you take to prevent it happening again in future? I’d love to hear from you.
