I had one of my WordPress blogs hacked last week and whilst I did not lose too much – 
dumb asses hacked a blog that made about $0.03 a year – it did get me thinking about how you can prevent it.
Okay, wrong phrase. You can’t prevent it.
If they can hack into the Pentagon and the White House security records, my blog is never going to be too difficult.
But here are some steps you can take to make it more difficult, maybe to the extent that for $0.3, it’s no longer worth it. Course, you’re blog might earn $0.04…
Anyway, this is what you do:
Make sure that you always upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. When you log into the wp-admin area, it’ll always tell you if you should upgrade and there’s a free plugin that makes doing so a breeze.
Resist the temptation to use your name as the ‘username’ and ‘admin’ is even worse. I know you love your name, but don’t do it.
The password should be 12 characters and a mix of upper and lower case as well as numbers and keyboard characters (e.g. *,# etc). Don’t use two characters that are next to each other on the keyboard together either.
Install the following free plugins to provide a decent level of protection:
Antivirus
Paranoid911
Secure WordPress
WP Security Scan
One more plugin to use. Install WP-DB-Backup so that if everything does go bums up, you have your main database (and anything else you choose to save) backed-up. Hence, you can delete everything and start again fairly easily and quickly.
Finally, I’ve heard suggestions that if you use Filezilla as your FTP program of choice, it makes you more vulnerable to hacking. People I’ve heard this from have changed to a different FTP and never had a problem again so it’s one to think about.
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