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Protecting Your Blog: David Airey’s story
By Jamie | January 28, 2008
Last Month David Airey was victim of a hacker (Cracker) that managed to transfer his domain name, Davidairey.com. Within a couple of weeks with some help from the blogsphere, David managed to transfer his name back. David story is a timely reminder that your website/blog isn’t bullet proof from attack.
A week after this happened, one of my mates had £500 ($1000) taken from his PayPal account which was caused by his eBay account being hacked into. Fortunately PayPal refunded this money, well done PayPal! This certainly made me think again about web security.
You can read more about David’s story below:-
How can you protect your blog?
1. Backup your blog posts - Your blog has two parts, the files stored on the web server and the data stored in the blog database.
2. Use strong passwords - Always throw a mixture of numbers and none-numeric characters in your passwords.
Top 10 Most Common Passwords In The UK
3. Change your passwords - As well as having strong passwords, make sure you rotate or change the most important ones at least four times a year. Even if its just to increment a number within the password.
4. Use Feedburner - This really saved David’s bacon because the majority of his readers (3,000 of them) where subscribed via his Feedburner address rather that directly from his blog. I’ve wrote about this subject before…
Getting the whole picture, WordPress and Feedburner
5. Avoid Free Email Accounts - Whenever possible use a private email address for important account registration details such as domain, website hosting etc. Alternatively have a free email account that is only used for account registrations.
6. Install the latest version - Whatever your blog platform maybe (WordPress, Durpal etc), make sure you try to keep up-to-date with the latest version. Yes this can be some what of a pain, but whenever working on your blog, try and fit an update.
Topics: Marketing & Social Media, Network and Security, blogging |
January 28th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Nice tips, Jamie, and thanks for the mention.
FeedBurner really did save me in this instance, as there’s no doubt I’d not have received the same amount of publicity without all my regular readers knowing what happened.
One further tip is to remove the WordPress code from your header template, the one that states what version you’re running. If you aren’t using the most up-to-date package, it’s an advertisement for hackers to pay you some extra attention.
January 28th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
I’ve just read about Davids experiences with his site and it is truly dismaying that this sort of thing goes on. Hopefully, some very useful lessons for us all has come out of this fiasco and your tips are welcome Jamie!
Jas.
http://www.jasonslater.co.uk
January 29th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
What is the impact to use the free email account with the blog?