Internet Security for Bloggers

Yes it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. That’s because my blog got hacked and I lost a lot of administrative functions on my site. In between that, and getting it fixed, I also traveled to and spoke at three different blog conference. Whew! I’m tired. And I have a lot to say. But I’m going to start with a word about internet security for bloggers.

Why is Security Important for Bloggers?

As I learned right after returning home from Type-A-Mom Blog Conference, even mid-level wanna-be-bigger bloggers are not exempt from hacking attempts. What I’ve found out since is that a hacker will often specalize in a particular type of hacking and once her finds a weakness in a particular area, in this case the theme I was using for this blog, he will have scripts that search automatically and try to break into your blog. It’s almost entirely automated. He doesn’t have to find my site and decide to try to “mess me up”…it just runs the program, finds my blog and begins it’s attack.

If I hadn’t caught the problem when I did it would have been much worse. So internet security needs to be a priority for everyone who has a blog or website of their own.

How can I Protect my Website or Blog From Attack?

1. Have a strong password. More about passwords in a second.

2. Update themes, plugins and your wordpress blog. DELETE plugins and themes you aren’t using from your dashboard. (Don’t just leave them inactive because the files are still connected to your database when you do that.)

3. Change your password every 30 days or so. If you’re using a good password that will theoretically take 80+ days to hack, changing your password every month keeps you with a very good chance of not being hacked.

How Fast Can Passwords Get Hacked? What Makes a Good One?

OK so this is a non-geek’s translation of what I learned at I_Blog Blogging Conference a couple weeks ago, hackers can break your password so fast. A “Class A” hack attack (Not sure what the actual name is) can crack most 6-8 digit passwords in less than a minute. Less than a second. And Class A was the slow one. Yikes! No wonder my little attempt at a pithy password didn’t hold up long!

To make a secure password have at LEAST 8 digits, 10 are better. And combine capital letters, with lower case letters, numbers and special characters (like _, &, or @).

By mixing it up, a hacker’s program would have to try many millions of potential combinations before hitting on your password and even with the higher level class of attack it would take days…months…..MUCH safer.

A huge thank you to Bryan Assata and Threshold Technologies for putting my website back to rights to quickly and ably. Much appreciated! As for my readers – more blog conference thoughts to come.