How to Prevent Your Blog From Turning Into an Attack Site

How to Prevent Your Blog From Turning Into an Attack Site

Have you ever looked up a search term on the internet and ended up at a website that didn’t contain much information? As you try to click through the website it appears that your hard drive keeps turning? Also, does the indicator light of your computer’s internet connection keep blinking spastically?

Well, it may well turn out, regardless of whether your antivirus software tips you off or not, that you have accessed an attack site. You have gone to a place on the internet where you have no business going to.

To make matters worse, that website has actually implanted software into your Windows-based system without your consent. Unfortunately, Windows has certain vulnerabilities so that hackers play all sorts of tricks that lead people to unwittingly install all sorts of junk software.

I wish I could tell you that the vast majority of these software are simply harmless junk. Maybe they flash ads, maybe they show a movie with an ad at the most inopportune time. Those would be mild experiences. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is flat out malicious.

Not only would ending up at an attack site infect your computer, but your computer would proactively go to other websites and try to infect them. And then they, in turn, infect other websites.

Using this process, creators of bot networks would quickly build a network of attack sites spreading all sorts of garbage like spyware, viruses, malware, ransomware, you name it. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if your blog doesn’t get turned into an attack site?

Now, it doesn’t really matter how deep and involved your blog is. Maybe you touch your blog every once in a blue moon or, on the other hand, maybe you update your blog almost every hour because you run a very big website. Activity level really doesn’t have much to do with your safety.

If you’re serious about preventing your blog from turning into an attack site, you need to do three things. First, you need to make sure that your WordPress version is the latest version. In other words, you need to proactively update your WordPress installation.

There are no two ways about this. This is non negotiable. You have to do this. This is the first step to any kind of online security advice you would get from the internet. If you’re looking at a credible piece of advice, it must begin with this advice: you have to update WordPress. This is non negotiable.

Thankfully, WordPress has automated update features. Without lifting a finger, your installation would pretty much update itself. This is definitely a good first step, but it is still a first step because you have to actively monitor this to ensure that this is actually taking place.

The second thing that you need to do is to make sure that your antivirus is working properly because a lot of attack sites are created when individual users go to an attack site and then download something to their local computer. They then go back to their own WordPress blog and the software running in the background uploads the malicious software into their own blog.

This happens very quickly. This also happens smoothly behind the scenes. In fact, you can easily sleep through this process and be none the wiser.

The good news is, when you are running a very sophisticated antivirus system, you can be tipped off to this situation. At the very least, you would be told if your system is behaving in an abnormal way. That would be enough to get your attention so you can get to the bottom of it and prevent both your desktop computer as well as your blog from becoming part of an online bot network.

Finally, you can prevent all of these problems by hosting your blog on a very secure host. In other words, the secure host would not only automatically update your WordPress installation, but they also would run all sorts of software that prevent infections from taking place. They run many different layers of security, and they also ask you to log on several times using different credentials. This, of course, is done for your maximum protection.

If you take these three steps, you can rest assured that your website is probably not going to get turned into an attack site.