Despite the fact that the Internet is home to some really bad people, bloggers and website owners worldwide have shown once again that blogging is all about being inspired by other people’s success. Unless you live on the moon, you would have heard about David Airey’s demise about his .com blog being “cracked” by a devious individual supposedly from Iran.

It happened in the week before Christmas and has resulted in a tremendous wave of support from bloggers all around the world. David has now finally gotten his domain back and his story is one of despair, frustration, resolve and happiness. Hearing about David really made me think in terms of how safe our domains really are?

Since I’m not technically savvy (except for self taught stuff) it would be hard to know whether I’m currently exposed to hackers and crackers or whether there is nothing to worry about. David’s demise was initiated by a security issue in GMail, but how do we know whether we don’t have the same issues with other things instead?

The thought is scary and therefore I went and dug up some information from the net to help me understand on what can be done to help protect our domains and our computers.

Email:

Clients such as GMail, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and other email programs do contain security loopholes that can be accessed by hackers or crackers through a backdoor. They can infest our computers and access private data without our knowledge and often this kind of infection can be happening under our nose and through our contact email folder too.

To prevent this we need to make sure we run security updates and also have an updated firewall and virus protection at all times. Norton, CA, Zone Alarm are amongst some of the more widely used protection suites.

In the worst case scenario hackers will steal our private data and damage our computer beyond usability. That is why it is so important to backup our files every day/week or month.

FTP:

We use FTP to upload files to the servers and this can easily be exposed just like email programs. Hackers will send a Trojan style backdoor program that accesses your computer and send private data through the Internet without your consent.

An option to stop this from happening is to never open any attachments from emails we don’t know, expect or find rather strange. Also, you could un-tick your firewalls FTP access and only allow when you are in the process of uploading files.

WordPress:

This is a biggie since most of us are on running WordPress these days and all though the bloggers who run the free WordPress blogs can’t really help themselves except use a rather complicated password and update it often, those with self hosted WordPress blogs can.

I found an excellent white paper that will give you certain peace of mind and lets you configure your WordPress security to protect against unjustly intrusion.

Secure WordPress White Paper

Conclusion:

I think it is suffice to say that we can do simple things to protect ourselves against hackers and crackers. One would be to use different and complicated passwords and chance them frequently.

The other would be to use common sense when using online applications. Plugins, Widgets, Share Ware and Software in general have the potential to do us harm and often we use them on recommendation and trust bases from other bloggers.

If you rather want to exert caution, then it might help to test them on an offline server first. Xamplite is a good way to test all your WordPress related themes, Plugins and more offline.

The threat of being hacked certainly exists for all of us, but with a little information and tweaking we can help ourselves. Another great way to stay in touch with what hackers and crackers are up to is to search for online forums and websites where these people congregate.