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Good morning! It's Jan Kearney at My Local Business Online and today is day 5 of Bonnie
Gean's Video Blogging Challenge. I want to give myself a quick pat on the back for actually
doing 5 videos, 5 blog posts and keeping up so far with the challenge this week, which
is a minor miracle!
It's a really quick video today. Today I am officially 44. I'm going to go and get on
with some work and celebrate with coffee in a second. But before I do that, I wanted to
have a quick word about Wordpress and online attacks. Most of us use WordPress for our
blogging. It's a fabulous platform, absolutely amazing. The slight downside is because it
is so popular, it is often target for attacks.
Now the reason I'm bringing this up now is I logged into my email last night and there
was a stream, just duh, duh, duh, duh, of emails where a clients had been hit and stopped
from logging in. These types of attacks are quite common, there's a lot of it going on
at the moment. Even the big guys are getting hit – Hostgator, the owners of Hostgator,
EIG with Bluehost have been walloped by attacks and taken down. Aweber the email software
have been getting hammered all week. It's not new and it is going to get worse.
So what can you do as a small business owner? Because, don't kid yourself, you are a target.
People don't want to take your site down, they're not there to damage your business.
They want access to your little bit of the web so they can sit in the background then
use it to their own advantage. This day and age, often to attack other sites as part of
a bot-net. In my clients case, they didn't get in. they had a secure login and password.
The emails were just a report to say someone had been locked out.
What can you do right now? I want you to do it right now, first of all check your login
is NOT admin. If you are logging in with admin, you've left yourself wide open. You've given
these bots, because it is all automated, the first key to your website. So go and change
it. Over on my blog, a while back, I did a how to change your admin post. I'll dig that
out and put the link on the bottom of the vid. There are plugins that you can use as
well, but I personally prefer to do it my way with no plugin.
Secondly, please ensure you gave got a decent password. It's not your pets name, your date
of birth. It's not password123, letmein or anything else that is remotely similar! Use
a combination of upper and lower case and punctuation, dashes, commas and everything
else. Go and change your password, make sure your login isn't admin already far more secure
than many, many other blogs out there.
I'll leave it on that note. Have a wonderful weekend, I'll speak to you soon!