A month ago I got hacked. My personal websites as well as most of the client websites I manager.
I was shocked. Who expects to get hacked? I sat back and looked at the “YOU GOT H4CK3D!” message scrolling across what was once my blog page.
Panic set it. I quickly checked the rest of my sites. All hacked.
I spent hours that night piecing together the websites from fragments of old back ups and doubled up the security only to get hacked again two days later. It felt horrible. I eventually found out the web host I stored the sites was not secure enough, so I moved to a better one and learned everything I could about internet security.
It was hard to deal with, but now that it’s over I’m glad it happened. With the internet becoming more prominent hacking and online fraud will only become more wide spread and it is important to know how to protect yourself.
Here is what I learned:
- Use strong passwords with at least 8 characters, some capitalized letters, and a few numbers.
- Don’t use the same password multiple times. If somebody hacked one account they would have the password to all of your accounts. Use unique passwords for each of your most important logins like bank and email accounts.
- Don’t use “admin” or your name as a login. Hackers are looking for easy ones to guess.
- If you use a laptop (like I do) make sure you have the firewall turned on otherwise every public wifi network you connect to leaves your computer wide open to hackers.
- Don’t buy cheap web hosting. It costs more in the long run.
- Back up early and back up often. For both your computer and websites(if you have them).
Can you add to this list?
