Business Strategy Coach Tip: Don't Get Hacked

I woke up on a Saturday morning and my assistant a.k.a. Christopher stepped into my office to inform me that he couldn’t get onto my blog to do the maintenance and clean up that I had commissioned him to do. After several failed attempts, it became crystal clear that we had a problem. Support ticket and 25 minutes wait time lead to the word that literally de-stablized me…”Your website has been compromised by a malicious force.” I kid you not…that was the language to inform me that someone had “hacked” my account. All (7) of my websites were compromised.

Here are the lessons I learned that I figured what a great coaching opportunity to share with my community.

There are three things that you must do on a regular basis if you are using WordPress as a platform for your blog, membership site or company’s website.

1) BACK-UP, BACK-UP, BACK-UP - Did you hear me say backup? Yes…this was the one thing that I didn’t think about or even know that you should do. Backup your wordpress files. The easiest way to do it is to log in to your wp-admin and over to the left you will see a tab named “Tools.” If you click on tools you will see export tab…this allow you to export all of your posts, pages, pictures, media and comments to a file on your hard-drive and obvious you should be backing up your hard-drive…right? By doing this one thing it will save you a lot of pain and anquish if someone decides they don’t like you or that they are bored or whatever god-forsaken reason someone would choose to hack someone’s blog.

2) Update to New Version – Whenever I would log into my blog to make an update I would notice at the top of the page it would say new update available. In the past, I would ignore and continue working but what I’ve learned is that is how they are able to get in. They are able to write a “malicious script” from the older version and when you fail to update to the newer version you are leaving yourself wide open to get hacked. It really takes less than a minute…you just click on the update and click automatically update and voila (30 seconds later) you are done.

3) Change Your Passwords Frequently – What does frequently look like? For everyone it is going to be different but I would recommend at least quarterly if you are the only one in charge of the site. If you are outsourcing I would recommend that you do it on a monthly basis. I have hired and sadly fired over 8 virtual assistants which means there were 8 people who had access to my site. Not to mention when you hire someone to install it on your hosting account. Protect yourself…I am not suggesting that a virtual assistant would stoop so low as to sabotage your work. But this is your life’s work and your livelihood…not to mention your brand and reputation. Yes… it will take additional time which you may not have but at the end of the day it is well worth it.

Learn from my mistakes and take heed. As you grow your business and become more and more successful, you will make enemies. Everyone will not like you that sadly is the world we live in. Set-up your firewall, protect your computers, and do what you are good at which I hope is transforming and changing lives. To your success!