After writing The Hacking of Taylor Blue, I looked for some info and options for safeguarding our sites from hacking. What I learned is that there is no “surefire” way to keep your blog safe from being hacked! If someone with the technical know-how wants to hack your site, they can do it! What we can and MUST do is back up our sites as often as possible so if it ever does happen, at least we can save our data and start over with relative ease.

Because I know that we all have different ways of understanding information, this will be a two part series starting with some information from a good “techie” blogger friend of MomsCashBlog, Andreas of Xaviermedia.com giving us useful info on securing our cPanels. The next post will have more info on back ups and a little about hacking.  If you have any questions, make a comment.  Thanks Andreas!

Secure Your cPanel Account

by Andreas of XavierMedia.com

cPanel is one of the best control panels I know and my company Xavier Media is using it for most of our own hosting accounts. But as always a control panel (or for that fact any software) is not more secure then the users using them. Therefore you must make sure that anyone with access to your cPanel account is not the weak link causing your site to get hacked.

Get a secure password

In cPanel there’s a fantastic function that will help you to select hard-to-guess passwords for your accounts. You can even use it to generate passwords you’re going to use on other accounts too.

Login at cPanel and click on “Change Password”.

Then click on the “Generate Password” button to generate a random password. The nice thing with this generator is that you can select how long password you want, if you would like to use uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Just hit the regenerate button until you get a password that fit your needs. Please remember that a password should be minimum 6 characters (more then 8 is even better), should contain at least one uppercase letter (not the first or last letter) and if possible at least one number in the middle somewhere. If you add symbols like +, -, ? and % then you got a pretty strong (good) password already at 6 characters.

Read more »

Bloggers come and go, but when Taylor Blue went missing, I could feel that something was wrong! After I bought MomsCashBlog, Taylor Blue was a frequent commenter and she welcomed me with open arms and encouraging words from my very first post. I considered her a good blogging friend and of course I went to her site, taylorsentertainmentnews.com and I was hooked on it from the very first visit. She had a great entertainment gossip blog that was laid out beautifully with pictures of entertainers and the music industry, interesting stories, great ads, and it was updated constantly… sometimes even 4 or 5 times a day! (Wow, that’s dedication!) I went to it ALL the time to get my daily or weekly dose of entertainment gossip. Then one day, it was gone! I tried again and again and again and still could not find it. Althought it took me a while to find her (no site… no e-mail), I kept at it and I finally found another wonderful entertainment site that I liked a lot and something told me to e-mailed the admin and ask if she knew anything about Taylor Blue’s site. The Admin of TEN Gossip.com told me she WAS Taylor Blue, and she told me what happened to her taylorsentertainment blog. It was actually a horror story for bloggers because Taylor Blue’s wonderful blog that she put so much work into, had been hacked!

After a few e-mails back and forth, I asked if she would mind sharing her story with us on MomsCashBlog or if she’d rather just forget the whole experience.  She wrote back and said “YES,  I would love for people to know what happened and maybe they can prevent it from happening to their blog.” So I asked Taylor Blue a few questions thru e-mail about her hacking experience… a blogger’s nightmare! Read more »