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Wordpress Wisdom; What You Can Learn From Robert Scoble’s Hacking

Here at Blog For Profit you’ve been encouraged to blog. You’ve been shown how to build and promote your blog. And its been stressed that you want quality content in your blog. But did you know that you need to take precautions to protect that content?

A recent security hole in Wordpress caught well known blogger Robert Scoble by surprise and he found that his blog was not only vulnerable, but was hacked. He actually lost about 2 months of his blog and his blog was removed from the Google index due to malicious code the hackers placed on his archive pages.  Ouch!

How did that happen?

Three key things weren’t done in a timely manner that left his blog open to this hack.

1. He hadn’t updated to the latest version of Wordpress.  I know a lot of people are reluctant to do this for various reasons.  They may worry about it being compatible with the plug-ins they are using, or they think it’s a pain in the butt to upgrade.  But in this particular case Wordpress actually announced that they were providing the update to address a security hole found in prior versions.  The lesson here is that you should keep your blog running on the latest version of Wordpress. Better to have your blog safe with a plug-in disabled until it too is updated than risk your content.
2. Mr. Scoble admitted to not doing  back ups to his blog on a regular basis.  It’s easy to ignore this one when we get super busy, but honestly Wordpress makes it easy. In the Dashboard under the Tools section you’ll find the Backup option. It’s quick, easy and pretty painless. And it insures that you still have all of your content should something catastrophic happen.
3. The final item that left the blog open to hackers was the use of the default, ‘admin’ name for administrator. Using this as a user name makes it easier for hackers, now all they have to figure out is the password. Set up a unique user name and password, give that name administrator privileges and delete the ‘admin’ account once you have.

When you think about it, there are precautions that you take to keep your home and possessions safe.  The same applies to your blog.  Take a few simple safety precautions to keep your content safe, and you’ll have no reason to fear using Wordpress.

Tina Marie Hilton is the virtual assistant behind Clerical Advantage, a faculty member at Solo Practice University and contributing editor at Home Office Warrior. You can keep track of what else she’s involved in by following her on Twitter where she is @TMarieHilton.

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Published by: Grant Griffiths

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Full post as published by Blawg for Profit on September 09, 2009 (boomark / email).