Written By: Allison Midori Reilly
If you are a successful blogger, one who is a prominent voice in your field (and maybe even paid to be that voice), then you have tons of assets in your website and in your posts. You may not be a large firm with customer information, but you stand to lose a lot if your blog or website is hacked or is injected with malicious code that turns it into a phishing site. This is why even you, a simply blogger need to make sure you have website security.
Website security involves a number of different elements, such as connecting to a secure network, data encryption, and backing up your blog posts and content. However, the most important element of website security for bloggers is website monitoring, where your blog is monitored for changes and suspicious activity. Depending on how often you ‘blog’, you may not be able to catch a problem until after-the-fact, when it may have already done damage to your brand/reputation or have turned away potential web visitors. Once that happens, you then have to take the time to fix the problem, to prevent it from happening again, and to do some damage control before you can get back to blogging.
Sounds like a hassle, but it’s a hassle that can be avoided if you are proactive instead of reactive about your website security. There are many tools out there to help you implement or to improve website security. Some of these include:
Vault Press is specifically for WordPress sites. Other services include SiteLock, McAfee Secure, Verisign and WebsiteDefender. These services are online service which patrol your website for vulnerabilities and suspicious hacker activity and find security issues before they happen, while alerting you of a breach as it happens.
Even though you may not be collecting credit card numbers or personal information from your web visitors, that doesn’t mean that your website security is a non-issue. Hackers go after insecure websites for a number of reasons. It could be the act of a jealous or rival blogger, or of someone who doesn’t like what you blog about. The hackers could be after your web hosting, or may want to use your website as a way to send spam, to inject malware into others’ computers, and to get into the computers of your web visitors to steal their information. Good website security not only protects you from becoming a target, but protects your website from becoming a cybercrime tool for hackers.
If you’re a blogger, don’t think that this stuff can’t apply to you because you’re just one person with a website. All it takes is one attack to mess up your reputation and everything you’ve worked for.