Security tips for Web Bloggers to stay protect online

Nowadays, people access blogs for exchanging ideas with others. Bloggers retain their blogs and constantly update them either for financial benefits of just out of passion.

Worldwide Blogging is considered as a serious business by many people as for some it is the main source of income, while other bloggers just get some extra income out of it. Keeping this in mind and also the fact that blogs are considered being the 5th most trustworthy source of information that you can find on the internet, if you own a blog you should definitely consider any available options for protecting it.

Malware infection on blogsMalware infection is a common “harm” that can be caused to your blog, believe it or not, as cyber criminals are very creative in doing their malicious work. Some sources of infection for your blog can be:

• Your web hosting control panel
• Infected advertisement banners
• Breaking the administrator password
• Code injections in the blog’s HTML
• Plugins integrating with your blogging platform

Checking whether your blog is infectedWhen you created your blog, you may had thought that marketing and writing skills are all you needed to have. Well that would be wrong. A blog owner needs to know how to keep the blog data protected and which measures to take for staying protected against cyber-attacks. You can define whether your blog is infected by the presence of these symptoms:

• The appearance of your blog has changed and your content and graphics replaced by others (website defacement).
• Your blog’s visitors are prompted to download and install apps like Java or Flash player just upon their visit to the blog’s page.
• You receive an error message when you try to access the blog.
• You see banners about guns, drugs etc. appearing.
• Immediately when you try to access the blog you get redirected to another site (URL redirects).
• You receive notifications from your hosting providers about spam alerts coming from your site.

Here are 7 important tips for keeping your blog secure

1) Set strong passwords

Any accounts that are connected to your blog should have a strong password while you should avoid using the same password (despite its complexity) for all your accounts and apply 2 factor authentication. All the above should be combined with frequent password changes.

2) Control access to the blogYou should create a new administrator account and delete the existing default one as the cyber criminals tend to target these accounts. You also need to define the access rights for all the user accounts and delete those that belong to users to post irrelevant content.

3) Maintain an updated blogging platformBe sure to immediately apply any updates that are released for your platform as these will also close any recently discovered security holes.

4) Regularly backup your blogYour blog’s database needs to be regularly backed-up, so be sure to include this in your schedule. This can be done either with the use of a web hosting package (which includes automatic back-ups) or can be performed manually. At least 2 copies of the blog’s database should be retained.

5) Update your pluginsAlways keep your plugins updated as cyber criminals will use the vulnerabilities that exist for harming your blog and also delete any old plugins that you don’t use anymore.

6) Use only themes from trusted sourcesIf you plan to install a theme that was not obtained from a trusted source, just don’t as you risk of having malicious code installed on your website.

7) Protect your computer from malwareWhile ensuring your blog’s security is important, retaining a clean and safe computer, equipped with a good antivirus and a malware blocking tool is important too and of course always keeping it up to date by installing the latest application and security updates.