Protect Your Blog Against Hackers, Don’t be a Sad “My Blog Got Hacked” Story

The image you see before you is a real screenshot that I cropped and put on Anticareer… there are almost 24 Million results in Google for:  my blog got hacked .  If you want to see how painful having your blog hacked is you can check out some of the stories.  I spent a few minutes diving in and reading a couple and it really makes me sick that someone would go out there intentionally and break into someone else’s site and destroy all their hard work.  There are multiple things that someone can do if they hack into your site.  They can do something not too harmful like insert a few of their links so they get some SEO linkjuice, but if those links point to some bad sites Google will penalize your site because they will think you are trying to drive people to a malicious site.  You could also get malware implanted on your blog and once Google sees this your site will be deindexed.  I had that happen to me before and it is not fun.  First you have to clean up your files, and if you have multiple sites on the same server they could have infected all the sites (which they did to me, I had 100 sites infected with malware which was definitely not a fun Thursday).  Then you have to tell Google that you got rid of the malware and to please index your site again. If you want to see if your site has malware there is a good, fast, and free service you can use found here:  http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/

If someone doesn’t like you for whatever reason and they hack into your site they could delete everything out of there.  Once of those heart breaking stories I read was about someone that this happened to and they did not keep a backup of anything so they lost a blog that they had spent 5 years working on.  Can you imagine that?

So there is two morals of the story here, first, you should always back up your files if you can.  Second, if you protect your blog than you can avoid the heartache of losing it all potentially.  There are a few free plugins out there that say they will protect your site.  The problem with free plugins is that a lot of the plugin authors do not keep their plugin updated to take into account new attacks that are happening.  When it comes to protecting your site I’d recommend the Sentry Pigeon plugin which you can see in action here.  I know nobody likes spending money, but for $27 it is a no brainer.  If you’ve spent more than 1 day working on your blog than you have an asset that is worth more than $27 so dropping $27 to protect it is common sense.

If you had your blog hacked into and had some naughty things done to it drop a comment and let us know what happened.  I’m always interested to hear stories, especially when I’m in the bathroom and searching on my Ipad for something interesting to read.