Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

Protect Your WordPress Website from Hackers + Get Results from Your Online Marketing Efforts!

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

In the last six months we have experienced a wave of hackers getting into our custom WordPress author websites.  The problem is that hackers have realized how popular WordPress sites are (internationally); as a result, many of them focus on finding weaknesses and hacking into thousands (gosh maybe millions) of sites. Less work—more payout. The good news is that we are more diligent in our efforts to make you aware of the importance of keeping your site updated. Why? Because while the bad programmers are working to get in, the good WordPress programmers are working to keep them out. The bad news is that updating your site can cause errors due to conflicts with custom php code and plug-ins. Stay with me.

You can very easily click the Please Update Now link from your WordPress Dashboard. And it will update, but what can also happen is that your blog can quit working, your theme can get wiped out, your plug-ins could stop working, and your blog could be rendered useless. It could also work seamlessly. So, how do you know what yours will do? Well, you don’t. Each site is unique to this equation. That is why it is so important to back up your website and your database content.

At Monkey C Media we do a complete backup of your site so we are ready for any hiccups, and after each update we do a physical check to ensure that everything works properly.

At the risk of boring you to pieces, here’s an example: (more…)

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Alleviate Your E-mail SPAM Jitters

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

I get close to 700 e-mails a day. It’s exhausting. Perhaps a fourth of my incoming e-mails are SPAM, so I tag them as junk and they go away eventually (only to be replaced by others). Many people ask me about this modern day phenomenon: “how do you get rid of SPAM?” Well, the simple answer is “you don’t.” You can mark it as junk or bounce it and that will help. There are some tools and SPAM combatting methods that I will list (more…)

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WordPress Sites Are Being Hacked

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

A Virus is embedding malware into WordPress powered websites:

Several of our client websites have been hacked this week.  We discovered yesterday that they are attacking WordPress sites because of a vulnerability in the program—this has been addressed and a new version of WordPress is now available. Version 2.9.2. is the most recent version as of today May 18, 2010.

My team at Monkey C Media has spent the last two days scanning all of our client sites for any sign of this virus.  Luckily only three of our sites were hacked.   We were able to remove the malware without losing any content.

Who is Affected?

These hackers are not just attacking WordPress powered sites.  They are injecting malware into PHP files.  So, this means if you have a Drupal, Joomla, OsCommerce, or any other site that uses PHP files, you could be their next victim.

What should you do?

  1. Upgrade your respective software to the most recent version.
  2. Scan your site for alien files.  You can contact your webmaster, or even your hosting service (like GoDaddy for example), or do it yourself.
  3. Check your Users menu to make sure that no alien users have been created in your back-end that a hacker could use later after everything has been fixed—then it would start all over again.
  4. Change your password.  Make sure that you choose something that has a minimum of 8 digits including upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
  5. Ensure that your theme still works seamlessly, and that your plug-ins and SEO data still work properly
  6. Install a backup feature on your site if you do not already have one and start backing up your content regularly
  7. For those of  you who love to read as much as possible and can handle the jargon, read this WordPress article about securing your blog site

What could happen?

This particular virus is creating links within your site that will in turn link back to the hacker’s site thereby driving traffic and further improving their rankings.  Google has been said to sandbox a site with malware because of the obvious risk to security.

What others have to say:

If you would like to learn more about this nasty virus, please follow the below links:

Here’s what GoDaddy has to say on the subject
Here’s what people are saying on WordPress Forums

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Posted in Resources, Tweet this | 3 Comments »

Blogger Discontinues FTP Publishing

Friday, May 7th, 2010

For many years I have recommended that authors host their blogs on their own servers. I have several reasons for this way of thinking. Firstly, as authors, we are attempting to drive traffic to our websites, to draw in our audience, and to make the sale. Placement within the search engines is an important step in this process. However, the only way to gain placement is to be ranked for keywords that your potential audience is searching for. See, this is how they find you, which is way more effective than standing on a street corner shouting the merits of your wares.

A blog ensures that you have fresh, relevant content posted to your site frequently. This is important because the search engine bots and spiders are out their scanning websites for, you guessed it: fresh, relevant content. If you have a stale website then not only will your audience lose interest, so will the spiders. The blog is the perfect author-marketing tool, and there are so many good platforms to choose from: WordPress, Blogger…rrr, well, until now.

This new fact is important.

Blogger has discontinued FTP Publishing. This means that (more…)

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Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Tweet this | 3 Comments »