9 Ways To Protect Your Blog From Spammers and Hackers

[Dave Gibson]

Bloggers should make securing their blogs a high priority. Blogs are spammed and hacked everyday by ruthless individuals. There are steps that you can take to increase the security of your blog and limit the chances of someone hacking into your online account, stealing your content and re-posting it for their benefit or, worse yet, stealing email addresses of your followers and spamming them using your account info or selling their info to someone else.

1. Use plug-ins that will hide your login screen. There are free plug-ins available such as Stealth Login for WordPress bloggers

2. Ban certain users. Use blog plug-ins that prevent users from making several attempts to access your blog by trying to crack your password.

3. Use blog plug-ins that prevent automated programs such as spiders and bots from obtaining access to your blog.

4. Use blog plug-ins that can encrypt your logins

5. Use plug-ins that ensure stolen passwords can be used only once - very nice

6. Update your blogging software and plug-ins regularly

7. Use a strong, complex login password

8. Change the admin name

9. Use plug-ins that can check comments via a web service to verify that it is not spam

Hope the above info is helpful to you....I've been in the I.T. field for over 10 years...8 of the 10 years were spent fighting viruses, rootkits, trojans, spyware, and worms. I've seen the damage done to businesses and frustration expressed by individuals that have been affected by malware. In most cases, it's the "little things" that could have been done to prevent or limit the damage done to a company's servers/workstation or a home user's computer. And, in most cases, the damage can be reversed in a cost effective way by a person truly skilled in malware removal. Take the steps above and protect yourself and your data. If you have any questions, please let me know...thanks.

[Chris Adams]

The WP plugin Login Lockdown is definitely a great addition to any WP-based blog. You should also check out the "Secure Wordpress" plugin.

2 other tips:
- change the "readme.html" file included with Wordpress to something different because it shows your current version of WP to would-be hackers
-check your "wp_login_fails" MySQL table via phpMyAdmin to see if people are trying to brute force their way into your site