Protect Your Blog From Hackers: Blogging has to be a popular way of communicating ideas, opinions, and information to the outside world not to mention that it is also an opportunity for generating some income.
Such is the popularity of blogs that hackers are now looking to exploit the vulnerability of millions of blogs around the globe. Still, many bloggers tend to ignore this. No wonder many bloggers never bother to tighten up the security of their blogs.
You should never think that your blog is immune to hackers and this article will go through some of the key techniques you should leverage to prevent attacks from hackers and improve security on your blog.
How To Know If Your Blog Is Hacked
First and foremost how do you know if a site is hacked? Well, attackers have different reasons for attacking blogs. Some do attacks for fun while some would want to benefit from the attack, For instance, an attacker may route your traffic to his/her website.
Some may want to use your blog for hacktivism-this has grown quite prevalent in recent times. Long story short, you should always be on the lookout for anything strange on your blog. Things like strange pics, links and other types of content you didn’t post. Another common symptom of a hacked website is uncharacteristically slow load speed.
You are also advised to do a google search of your site on google just in case you find anything strange with titles and description of the results. You should also look out for things like dropped google rankings or decreased blog traffic.
How to Protect Your Blog From Hackers
Techniques To Prevent Your Blog From Cyber Attacks
It is important to note that sometimes you may not know if your site is hacked meaning that it is just better to implement security measures before things go south. So, how do you prevent hackers from having a field day on your blog?
- Use EV SSL Certificates
The first and perhaps the most important way of preventing cyber-attacks are to encrypt information as it is transmitted online. This can be done using what is known as SSL certificates. They are essentially small files that bind cryptographic keys to your blog.
This way the communication between the server and the browser is secured hence protecting login data, credit card data and any other information that might be intercepted by third parties.
You should go for a higher validation of certificates known as EV SSL Certificate. If you have an EV SSL Certificate, then the customer can fairly distinguish between your site and that of an imposter.
- Secure Logins
You should always secure your login pages regardless of the platform you are using to blog. Of course, there are lots of options to do this depending on the platform you are using.
If you are using WordPress for instance, you can use some plugins to create Captcha that will prevent bot attacks on your WordPress login form. You can also install plugins to prevent attacks like brute force attacks among others.
- Secure Your Email
Your emails should be most protected if you are to avoid stolen passwords and identity theft. Most hackers know where to fish and emails access are the top of their priority list.
So, if possible you should separate your personal mail to the mail you use for your blog. Moreover, you should use strong passwords and other verification options to improve your mail security.
- Backup Your Blog
You should always ensure that you backup your blog to guarantee that you recover it in the case of a deadly attack. You can do this manually but better still you could use some great plugins to do automated scheduled backups of your blog.
- Use Plugins You Trust
One of the reasons behind the popularity of CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others has got to be the capabilities to install plugins to extend functionality on your website.
Little do many bloggers know that whenever they install a plugin, they let it access the core parts of their site. Hackers are smart and they can exploit vulnerabilities in the plugins to nail your blog.
As the rule of the thumb, you should only install those plugins from developers with a great reputation in the market rather than going for plugins from inexperienced developers.
- Install Security Tools and Software to Protect Your PC
Do you know that PC can be used as a route to attacking your website? Think of it this way, if an attacker infiltrates any cookies or passwords on your PC then this could be used to access your blog.
To prevent this, you will need to use premium antivirus software on your PC plus you can also use firewalls to protect your network connections.
- Disable Hotlinking
Anytime your blog content is copied, chances are that the images in the post are also copied while the links point back to your server.
This is known as hotlinking and it will surely lead to an increased load on your server hence a reduced performance plus increased security risks.
Thankfully, there is a way around this thanks to CloudFlare – a content delivery network that is great for improving blog security.
The CDN will improve your load speeds whilst also cache data and fetch the information related to the location of your visitors. The tool will also let you protect against hotlinking.
- Add Links to Your Blog Posts
Interestingly, it doesn’t take a lot to secure your content from thieves around the web. As a matter of fact, most of them just copy content without bothering on reformatting.
This is why links can come in handy as they will add attribution to your content anytime your content is copied.
Again, there are some great tools to automate the process of adding such links to your website content.
Conclusion:
Well, these are some of the must-do methods if you want to secure your blog in a world where cybercriminals are always on the attack. However, you should always make sure that you keep updating your security techniques by keeping in mind that what works today may not work tomorrow.