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How to Keep Your Blog Safe From Hackers!

There are actually blogs and forum that talk about how to hack into other people’s sites. Of course it’s never said so blatantly but is rather disguised. For instance, on these sites someone will post that, “If you do such and such you can find and hack into someone’s site…so if you ‘find’ such a site be kind and let the owner know his site is vulnerable.” This is what’s called reading between the lines. These folks are really just teaching other hackers how to hack.

This is very dangerous! Your sites could start going down one by one. Be sure not to use ‘admin’ as your user name and choose a strong password.

I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about how their WordPress blogs are being hacked lately. You should always update your WordPress blogs every singe time an update comes out. Especially if it’s a security issue. I personally know about ten people who have had lots of their blogs hacked within the last month. That is why I want to take a moment and share a tip with you that can help keep your WordPress blogs a bit safer.

Big Tip: hide your list of plugins. The reason you should hide your list of plugins is because a hacker can find out what plugins you use by following this url: www.example.com/wp-content/plugins. Obviously replace ‘example.com’ with whatever your site is.

Hackers find out which plugins have vulnerabilities and regularly exploit them so it’s a good idea to hide your list of plugins. How do we do this?

  • Open up notepad and save a blank file named “index.htm.” You actually need to put the quotes around that so   the file isn’t accidentally saved as a text file.
  • Now open up your FTP client and upload the empty file you just created (index.htm) into the wp-  content/plugins directory on your server.

You’re finished!! Piece of cake right?  You might also take care to cover your templates too. Just do the exact same thing but upload the empty file to wp-content/themes and that will take care of your templates.

I strongly recommend that you try this out and update all of your wordpress blogs with this little fix. It would be a terrible shame to have that blog you have been working on for two years suddenly die. These hackers are usually just malicious nerds who have nothing better to do than just totally mess up your site. They will get inside and just cause havoc for the fun of it. Some hackers will try to inject things into your sql database by exploiting security vulnerabilities in old versions of WordPress.

By the way, you can see lots of blogs that haven’t covered their tracks by googling wp-content/plugins. Don’t be one of them!

Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:54 pm and is filed under WordPress Tips . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “How to Keep Your Blog Safe From Hackers!”

  1. Gerry Says:
    October 6th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

    Great tip!! I tried this an it works great.

    Thanks

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