Recently my Crescentmusic.com site was hacked. It still worked, and no one visiting the site was in danger, but some nefarious degenerate had piggybacked another site onto my server, buried deep in the file structure. I discovered it when my site would not allow me to update things. It took hours and hours to clean. There were thousands of files I had to delete and they had altered some of my system files to hide their activities so it kept coming back after I thought I’d deleted everything. I eventually had to start from scratch – take down the old site, reinstall WordPress, and then recreate the site (luckily all the articles and content were untouched).
Anyway, a participant from one of my wordpress seminars clued me into a free plugin called WORDFENCE recently – Thank you Helen. It scans your site every day and alerts you to any changes to files or plugin/theme updates. You can then ask it to fix it for you by replacing the hacked files with the original ones.
If you have a WordPress site, install Wordfence today and run a complete scan. Be sure to have it scan theme and plugin files (optional check boxes in the setup) since those are common back doors for hackers. Keep your site software (like WordPress, Blogger, etc.), themes and plugins updated because most updates are to fix security holes. Also, it’s a good idea to change your passwords every so often for your site, your ftp and your hosting – and DON’T USE THE SAME PASSWORD FOR EVERYTHING.
This advice goes for other things as well – phone apps, website logins, and even your computer operating system and programs.
And, of course, keep your virus checker up to date, and back everything up regularly (don’t forget your phone). I use CARBONITE for automatic offsite computer backup. Click on this referral link and get backed up TODAY: GET CARBONITE. Using this link will give you 2 months free.