It is a sad fact of life that you do need to take steps to protect your blog because there are people that would love to hack it just because. There are also those who will do it for personal gain, whether it be through adding links or redirecting your traffic.

Now the next part is the bad part because no matter how hard you try there is no way to fully protect yourself from someone that is good and determined. That being said you can make it harder and you can protect yourself to survive if you are targeted.

One of the most important things is to have a current back up of your data base and copies of any theme and plugin files that you have changed.

I like to keep a current copy of my full wp-content folder as that contains all the theme files, plugins and any files such as images that I have uploaded.

You can use WP-DB Backup to easily backup your data base from your dashboard or to email you a copy regularly. I would recommend that you create a special Gmail account and have the email sent there but still weekly download a copy to your computer too. Then I don’t trust automation completely ;) .

Two other plugins that will help protect or at least notify you quickly if you do get hit. They are Antivirus which will help you find exploits and spam injections and the WordPress Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Antivirus can be set up to scan and email you daily (and yes I still run it manually on occasion) which will check all your theme files for any additions.

Having good backups and using these plugins will at least allow you to find problems quickly and be able to fix things if you do get attacked.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: data base backup, protect wordpress, spam injections, wordpress plugins

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