Defend Your Blog

Trackback Spam: The Price Of Page Rank

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog, FAQ | 0 comments

I don’t mind telling you, there is a downside to finally getting your blog a page rank. Trackback Spam. And yes, I have written before about the wonderful way to get inbound links to your blog using Trackback’s, but this isn’t what I meant. Leave it to spammers to take a perfectly good, innocent and well thought out tool and corrupt it. Trackback Spam verses Legitimate Trackback’s There is a difference. Trackback spam is the automated crap that crawls the web looking for sites with Page Rank, and one word that matches their needs. Hell, I don’t even think the one word is a requirement. Once found, the bot...

Defend Your Blog: Scan For Vulnerabilities

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog | 1 comment

I hate to do it. Tempt the fates that is. After weeks of effort, lost time, missed billables, disappointed clients and frustrated days -- I think I am free. Virus free that is.

And even as I am writing this post, I feel a tremor in my loins. A quick check of my site in my FTP program shows a cache directory I didn’t update! Run the file permissions recursed into subfolders and update the .htaccess file to protect the directory. Am I ready? Maybe.

Pardon The Dust And Swearing

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Blogging, Defend Your Blog | 1 comment

It's likely to get bad around here for the next couple of weeks. In fact, it's bad not just here!

I own and update more than 50 blogs, and every single one of them is currently *under construction*. Or to be more accurate, being moved from one hosting control panel to another.

See, I got tagged with a virus. A little bit of injected code that someone managed to get past the defenses that were in place at the time. (Admittedly, not as much as is in place now). After chasing it for almost 2 months now, I broke down and requested my hosting company move me to a new server. They graciously agreed.

Protecting Your Blogs FTP Area

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog | 1 comment

Some %$@#$>%$@#$#^& found/hacked/stole your FTP account password. Now what? Well, change it of course, but that might not be enough.

(Can you feel my self restraint in not actually swearing?)

Here is a simple method you can use to prevent anyone other than you from uploading or downloading files.

Defend Against The Bot’s

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog | 2 comments

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, your Wordpress blog)

Sabre: Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine

Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It's a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog.

Your visitors are granted permission to register freely on your blog and now you are plagued by fake users automatically created by spammers?

Firewall For Your WordPress Blog

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog | 6 comments

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal) In the military, they call it “hardening targets” when they take steps to make it harder for the enemy to attack an asset. Here in the real world, it’s hard to think like that. But not thinking like this could cost you time, money, reputation and frustration. I know from first hand experience. When I started this series, it was in response to the attack my personal hosting account suffered. And because it was my hosting account, and not a single blog, but rather every single one of my sites was hit. Take my advice and harden your assets now.

Your Blog Is At War, Help Defend It

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog, Wordpress | 2 comments

Yep, you heard me right. Spammers, hackers, trogans and viruses… it’s a jungle out there. And your blog is a sitting duck.

I have a series of suggestions I will be making over the upcoming days to help you defend this valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, so stayed tuned. And if you haven’t grabbed the RSS feed yet, this might be a good time…

Akismet ~ Stopping The Spam Madness

Posted by Cenay Nailor in Defend Your Blog, FAQ | 0 comments

If you have had a blog up for any length of time, you are starting to get spam. It’s a fact of life. Sadly. However, there are some proactive things you can do to stop the spam madness. By default, WordPress comes with a plugin called Akismet . However, in order to use it, you have to get an API key for yourself. Strangely enough, you have to register for a WordPress.com account in order to do this. You can do this here: http://wordpress.com/signup/ Complete the Username and password settings. (Please note that only lower case letters and numbers are allowed in the username field). Just below the "Legal Flotsam" check box...