Prevent website or blog hacking before it is too late

    Is you website or blog  ever been hacked? What is blog hacking?

    It is shocking when my blog is hacked  few days back. I lost nearly 20 articles on my blog because of my negligence. Not taking regular back up is the negligence and it taxed me well written, indexed articles with the Google ranking juice. I did  this costly mistake without the basic knowledge of blog hacking and hackers. I am sure many bloggers do this mistake without understanding the importance of backing up website or blog . If you came to this page for that reason read the rest of the article and save your valuable work and effort.

    blog hacking

    What is website or blog hacking? Why are the measures to prevent  blog hacking?

    Hacking is injecting malicious software code into many vulnerable places of a website or blog code. The term hacking started as fun and technical experiments  by MIT engineers ways back in 1950 -60s. These experimental work of MIT experts became a hobby and then a passion. Few of them created  illegal hack code to make illegal free calls. With computer markets became popular, hacking extended to steeling computer data for security information and for malicious purposes.Well known hackers today are intelligent young engineers but perverted.

    Hacking techniques include scripting  and network programming.  Hacking is introducing dangerous software into healthy software code to snatch security issues. Where as cracking techniques involve on networks attacks by creating worms, DOS  attacks, or accessing devices remotely.

    Hackers have many skills – technical, understanding numbers, data analytics, computer  algorithms and reasoning power. More than this they have lots of patience. source what is hacking?

    Prevent hacking treats than cleaning up a hacked blog or website:

    Prevention is better than cure is a medical proverb and goes well with preventing  blog hacking. It is  tedious process to clean up a hacked site and require experts to do it. Cleaning up a hacked blog requires coding skills on many programming languages. It is important to know, how you identified the hack? What code is affected? How to clean it? Here are some visible indications of a hacked website or blog. If you

    • are unable to login to your wordpress  admin area with your usual user name and password
    • browser is taking you to a different website when browsing for your own site
    • see some unnecessary string on the browser displays ( I have identified my website hack through this sign)
    • When you find Google search results for your website or blog shows that your website as insecure?

    Let us discuss the cleaning process in a separate article. You can get more information on cleaning process in the following leads

    1. Beginner’s gude for cleaning up hacking
    2. White Security

    Prevention Techniques before hacking or safeguarding website or blog from hacking

    • Take a back up every day. It is advised to keep three copies of back up in different formats, one on the computer, one on external media like pen drive and one for remote access. on hacking

    Back up your content or total installation everyday, if you create articles every day and want not to loose your effort. I did this mistake and did not take backup for two months and the result is loosing well written 20+ articles, indexed by Google.

     Other precaution to prevent blog from hacking

    • Creating strong passwords for your admin area . For a strong password creation use a  mix capitals letters, special characters and small letters. Do not use birth dates and days.
    • If you are using wordpress as your content management, take care of your w-config, wp-admin, wp-inclides, wp-content and wp-plugin area and add additional security code to these file.
    • Choose a reliable hosting provider
    • If you can afford choose a manged hosting service instead of shared hosting.
    • Disable or delete unwanted plugins from your wordpress
    • Add extra security code into your  .htaccess file of your  data bases.
    • change the common data base table prefix wp- with addition characters like wp-abcd1234 followed by file name.
    • Before making the above changes take a back up and take a back up again after making changes and testing the website in working condition. Keep the latest copy of the back up in different formats like desktop, pen drive and remotely.
    • Set up a reliable firewall like sukuri. Use sukuri plugin and it is free