Protect Your Blog or Website: The Five Basics

Now that you have your own blog or website, and you consistently post updates, the last thing you want is to be hacked. You could end up losing all of your hard work or worse; your followers could be reading incorrect information about you or your company!


Hackers attack sites every day.

The software Wordfence protected Wordpress blogs, websites and registers an average of 3218 attacks per minute against Wordpress just during the time I wrote this article.

Just last week, Wordpress sites were under big attacks thanks the Heartbleed Bug, and the volume of brute force attacks jumped from 3500 to peaking at 20,000 failed logins per minute. In this case it was revealed that the hackers were actually others infected websites. Read the article about this attack here.

This means two things. First it's better to be prepared and be protected against attacks. Second, your own blog or website can be used without your consent as a weapon against others websites, which can get you in lots of trouble  - including large bill from your hosting provider!

Here Are Some Basic Tips To Avoid These Troubles:

1. Your password! It seems obvious, but you need a difficult password to crack. Avoid using your birthday or pets name. Choose one with upper and lower-case letter, numbers, and a random punctuation mark. Change it frequently.

          **We also recommend using Dashlane to host all your passwords. It is a verified encryption service that lets you host and access all your passwords via your computer and/or app on your phone. You can also send them out to others via an email that will delete in 30 minutes - very James Bond style!

2. Allow only a few login attempts. Three is the magic number. You've probably seen this with your bank - if you can't log in after three attempts you are locked out.

3. Do not login to your website via an unsecured wifi. Public wifi (aka Starbucks) can be dangrerous as anyone on the network can see what you are doing. There are software VPN systems you can install such as Hamachi and Privoxy that will protect you when you are away from the home or office. 

4. It's worth it to buy and use anti-virus software. If you are still using PCs (ahem, Mac users here!), you really should have some sort of anti-virus on your computer. McAfee and Norton as always good programs.

5. Create a backup to save all your work. BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! We can't say it enough! you can find how to do it right here.

Sources: Wordfence and Hayley Kaplan

Images: morguefile.com

Does your Company PASS or FAIL? Test Your Social Media Response

We all know we WANT comments and interaction from our viewers/fans on social media, but how exactly to do respond to their comments? What if it’s a NEGATIVE response?

Social media response can be critical and damaging for a business especially when neglected. In light of the Susan G Komen response disaster, there are great lessons to be learned out there —Test your social media response:

#1 – Do you clearly have posted what your policies are and what is acceptable? Does your company have an internal social media policy that details what employees can or cannot comment or state opinion when representing your company? (If you don’t SMG actually WRITES and customizes social media policies, email me at stephanie@socialmindedmediagroup.com for more information).

#2 – TROLL or RAGER Comments – Don’t “feed” them. If the comment is completely off the wall, a rant, ridiculous in nature and irrelevant, disgrard and DELETE.

#3 – UNHAPPY CUSTOMER or ON TOPIC Comments – Difficult to respond to usually because they may hurt your feelings, but you must remove all emotion and respond respectfully and thoughtfully. DO NOT DELETE. This will in light be a positive turn as your credibility will SOAR with the transparency. You will recover.

#4 – Unfortunately, you will take a small plumet. But YOU WILL RECOVER. Learn the lesson from Komen who deleted thousands of comments that were on-topic basically because they “didn’t want to hear it.” You don’t need me to explain to you how this was a sad, PR FAIL.

***Great model provided by Scribd.com (click image to view full site)