A New Generation Marketer

As some of you may have noticed in the past week, I was unable to post any new blog posts. This being because my site was hit by the Pharma hacker attack since my site is hosted through GoDaddy. I thought my site was safe and passwords secure, but that simply was not enough. Thus, the entire Site Admin page’s skin was nearly impossible to navigate.

Having never dealt with an issue like this, it took awhile to find out how to fix it. I got the run around from GoDaddy and they finally took out the malware JavaScript that was in my stylesheet. However, it was still not functioning correctly so I tried to look up information on the WordPress blog forum to no resolve.

After researching, calling GoDaddy and running my own tests, I found the following ways to keep your online life safer, not just to avoid hacks, but avoid identity theft and break-ins to your sites.

1. Ensure that your passwords are unique and not the same for all your sites. If you make the password the same for all your social media sites, website and email, and someone hacks into one of them, there is a high likelihood that they will try to get into your other sites. You can use a program called KeePass which is a password manager to save all your passwords across all sites. It also allows users to easily copy and past usernames and passwords right into the site login.

2. Run regular tests on your site for malware or other hacks. I had no idea for a few days that my site was hacked since I was not familiar with what a hack looked like. The front end of my site looked normal, so I never thought to check. A colleague then told me about the Pharma attack, I contacted GoDaddy and the malware was finally removed.

3. Run security and virus checks on your computer regularly. If your computer is infected with a bug or virus, it may transfer over to your site. Some bugs are designed to attack as much as possible and can get into your cookies, which then transfers over to the data on your sites. Keeping all aspects of your computer and online life safe and secure helps avoid any security issues.

4. If you have a website, occasionally check that no other person has hacked into your site and made themselves an admin or user. This can be done fairly easily if they are a good hacker, so ensure no one has done this since they can have full access to all your information and even lock you out of your site.

5. Keep your account information private. Never tell someone over the Internet what your login is to any site, give them access to a site, approve access to your site from a third party site that you aren’t familiar with, or talk about site specifics over the Internet. Believe it or not, people are searching for that data and can pick it up if you leave it out there for them. For example, if you are promoted to approve or deny access to a site of yours from a site you don’t know, just deny it since it may be a malicious program. I would even be hesitant to give a well known site or person access to my site to go in and fix it since you never know what they do with that data afterwards (you hope they are ethical and dispose of it properly).

6. Backup all your information on a regular basis. You never know when your site will go down, an account could be accidently deleted or you decide to deactivate your account. In order to prevent data loss, you must backup your information. Backupify offers a full line of services to backup accounts from Facebook to Twitter to WordPress and many more. You then can easily go into your account there and find any information that has been backed up so you never lose important data. This process is so important today, especially when your website is compromised like mine and you could lose data. [disclosure: I just started a new job at Backupify]

While some of these precautions did not apply to what happened to my site and how it could have been prevented, they are issues I have come across and would like to warn all against. The Pharma attack I had was fairly unpreventable since it was more on the side of web hosting servers being vulnerable. After reading a lot about the attack on GoDaddy sites, I have read much more negative feedback on the company than positive and am considering switching from them to a more reliable one.

Even if attacks like these are unavoidable, it is still so important to protect your information as much as possible on the Internet. As business has moved online so much and there are more and more malicous hackers, you must be that much more cautious.

Readers: Have you encountered a similar situation or know other ways to help protect yourself online?