Everything You Need To Know About Securing Your Blog Content

When you have created a blog, part of ensuring its success isn’t just providing quality content on a frequent basis, you must also maintain the proper security protocols to protect your blog from intrusion. If you don’t take the necessary precautions, any hacker who wants to gain access to your blog can hijack your content, alter the content and create all kinds of havoc with your site that can take months to unravel.

No matter whether you are using WordPress or another kind of platform to create you content, here are some steps you can take to make your content as secure as possible.

Change the admin login

Every website content management system provides you with an admin login when you first begin using the platform for blogging purposes. This is one of the easiest ways for hackers to access your content because many bloggers leave the admin username as is and that means that a hacker already knows the username and needs only to determine your password to take over your site.

You can prevent this by immediately creating a new username other than ‘admin,’ and make sure that you list yourself as the administrator of the new account. You can still use the same password that was associated with the admin username, but at least now you are making it much more difficult for a hacker to penetrate your security.

Install Anti-Malware Software

When you use WordPress or some other type of site content creation system, you can’t rely on the standard security software on the system to protect you from sophisticated network intruders. You must invest in a some type of security software that will constantly scan your account for malware, viruses or anything that appears suspicious.

This type of software typically has built in defenses against outside attempts to penetrate your network security, and will inform you of those attempts at your next login.

Think of anti-malware software as a vigilant guard that is on patrol 24/7 and provides you with an instant report the moment a breach or a suspected breach occurs.

Plagiarism Protection

Content theft is a problem that blog owners face practically daily. Nevertheless, you can make sure that your blog posts weren’t copied and published on some other resources. What can you do? Develop a habit of using anti-plagiarism software.

Every month upload your posted blog materials to the plagiarism detection engine and check if there are any similarities on other websites. After you’ve discovered any violation, let the website owner know that you’re an original author of the content and ask to delete plagiarized materials.

If the plagiarist doesn’t fulfill your demand, you can create a DMCA Takedown Notice to take measures.

Use a Password Generator

The password for your site content creation system is one of the key aspects of maintaining the proper level of security, so don’t take chances and rely on creating something you think a hacker won’t guess. Invest in a password generator, such as the one offered by Norton Security, which has a free Norton Identity Safe password generator that lets you input parameters that generates a password.

For example, you would input the length you want your password to be and whether you want letters, mixed case or numbers only. Your password is generated based on your inputs, and is is guaranteed to be much more difficult to crack than something you create on your own. In addition, many of these free password generators also offer secure password storage for all the passwords you have, which can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

Upgrade To Latest Version

If you’re using WordPress, you’ll often notice a message when you’re in the program that alerts you that the latest version of WordPress is available for download. Instead of ignoring this message or a similar message on another content creation system, make sure you download the newest version of the software.

This typically installs the latest software, plugins and any fixes to common problems users encountered on the previous version. It may seem like a little thing, but having the updated version of the system is always a step in the right direction when it comes to shoring up security for your blog content.

Restrict Access

Even when you own a blog in which many writers have access to the content creation system, you must restrict access as much as possible. Make sure you know everybody’s username and password, and ask each person who has access to change the password every few weeks. Make sure you set up a plugin that locks out any user who enters an incorrect username or password after three attempts.

Some hackers use programs that continue to assault a site with continuous guesses at usernames and passwords with an automated program that stores millions of username and password combinations. Using a plugin that limits the number of username and password attempts at three is an effective way to ward off this type of hacking method.

Back Everything Up

Computer security experts always advise clients to make sure that they backup their databases, or use clone programs to ensure that if there is a breach, you can still access your data and content on another content creation system if your existing one is compromised.

On WordPress for example, you should back up your database multiple times during the day and keep those backups on different hard drives or thumb drives for maximum security. WordPress offers an automated backup system that backs up your system several times during the day, but instead of relying on that automation, make sure you backup the backup by going in and manually backing up your content as well. It’s a lot easier to start your new site from a good backup, than to try and reconfigure your content from scratch.

If you take these simple steps, you will help secure your content against intrusion, and put into place the types of security protocols that hackers find difficult to breach. That doesn’t mean that you won’t get hit, but if you do get hit, you will be in a much more advantageous position to get back up and running quickly.