Tips to avoid getting hacked
I own and operate my own website, and I must admit that sometimes it is not easy at all. My website is over two years old. It is what I consider an online marketplace, some refer to it as an auction site; But it is much more than that. I also opened my site to members from all over the world, which may have been a mistake. Whether it was or not, I’m not going to let some people screw it up for others. During the time that my site has been up and running, it has been hacked numerous times. My site has nothing to offer in terms of financial gain and yet these people continue to feel the urge to hack my site. For the safety of my site, I do not mention your name in this article. There is no reason to provide more incentives for someone else to hack you.
And that’s the sad truth behind why people are hacking my site. Credit card information or other financial information is not stored here. My site and its members use pay pal and other forms of online payment services. Those independent companies handle the financial information. Therefore, they do not enter my site for these purposes. It is difficult for me to understand why someone would want to hack a site without any means of financial gain. They could be hacking my site to try and steal someone’s identity, but I also don’t see why they would want to do this. Members do not have to register with their real names. The only useful information that members store on my site is their postal address. What good is that to a hacker? You certainly can’t do much in the way of identity theft with just your postal address. So I also don’t think my site is being hacked for that reason.
No, the sad truth is that my site is good practice for a hacker-in-training or they just don’t have anything better to do. Keep this in mind when trying to find out why someone hacked your site. Sometimes they don’t look for anything at all. Their only goal is to cause problems for you and they get some satisfaction from this. I remember the line from Batman The Dark Knight that says; “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” The basic meaning is that some people just do things to be bad. That’s the only conclusion I can come to as to why people seem to enjoy hacking my site. So if you own your own website like I do, there are a few things you can do to make life more difficult for them.
1) The most important thing you can do is make sure you are using a top-notch program. This is not good for me, because my site is already working. However, if I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen a better program for my website. The better the program, the better the measures to prevent people from hacking that program.
two) Use a web host that will take care of the security for you. I’m going to do it alone, because luckily I have access to my own server. I have a relative who is dedicated to the information technology business and we own a server. So my site is on this server, but we lack the manpower and resources to monitor our servers like larger companies do. So if you are going to have your own website, host it with a good company. The bigger the company, the better the security and the more secure your website will be.
3) Make sure your admin panel username and password are more complicated and less predictable. Many of us like to choose passwords that are easy to remember. The problem with that is that we generally choose names, dates, and locations in some combination to form those usernames and passwords. This makes it easier for a hacker to gain access to your account, if you used familiar information when creating your username and passwords. Try to choose something that is not so obvious to the username, although it is not as important as your password. Make sure your password is long and contains numbers and letters. Be sure to use uppercase and lowercase letters.
4) This is probably the most important of all. Do not save your information on your computer! If someone gains access to your computer and you have all the information written down, then the secrecy of the username and password is out of the window. I know it seems like a good idea to write down this information and save it in case you forget it. If someone hacks your computer, they will have the keys to your website. They won’t need to hack, all they have to do is go to your website and use the information they took from your computer. I would recommend writing down all the important information that has to do with your website in a notebook. I have one of those calendar books to hold all my information. At least if someone steals this information, it’s close. Someone you can call the police. Not some guy sitting in front of his computer in Nigeria or elsewhere.
I have reported to the FBI people who have hacked my site over the years. The reality is, there’s not much they can do about it if the hacker is sitting somewhere in the Middle East. That was the region where the last hacker on my site came from. Somewhere in Pakistan I think. I reported it simply so the FBI has a record of the incident. If this hacker does enough with my site and other people’s sites, maybe something will be done about it. However, I am not holding my breath. However, I would recommend that you do the same. The FBI handles computer fraud and has a section on its website to report Internet crime. If someone hacks your site, report it. This is how they build cases and come to deal with these people.
In the end, no website is 100% secure. The sad truth is that as long as websites exist, hackers will exist. Use smaller websites like mine for practice until they feel like they’re ready to move on to bigger and better fish. The only thing that website owners like us can do is do everything possible to make our sites as secure as possible. Wrongfully continuing the damage done to our sites when we get hacked. Giving up is too easy. I imagine any of the hackers who hacked my site will be disappointed every time they log in to see that my site is still there. I could just shut everything down and let them win, but I can’t do that. I will not stop doing business online simply because someone felt the need to create more work for me. Then, I will continue to repair the damage done. An advice. Everything you have written about your website should be backed up and saved on your computer. I’m talking about things like their terms and agreements, legal policies, help text, etc. Save this material after it has been written and posted on your website. I learned this the hard way. When my site was last hacked, the hacker felt the need to remove all of this text from my site. I had to rewrite everything. So be sure to save any part of your web text that you don’t want to have to retype. So if your website is hacked one day, at least you will have what you need on hand to repair the damage.