Are Hackers Friendly People?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

When it comes to getting hacked, you might think that the guys who did that to you are real bad people. Not necessarily. It could be your pharmacist or the good looking guy next door. You know, the one who took you to dinner last weekend at the five star restaurant? You didn’t know he was a computer genius, did you?

Well, he may not be. He could just have enough money to pay the real genius to hack your website and divert your traffic to his online vialis candy machine.

Let’s face it. You don’t know who the people are that are hacking your website. They could be some terrorist cell in Albania, some family in Russia trying to keep food on the table, or the taxi driver who makes his second income from selling malware and spam fighting software by hacking websites. He could be the friendliest guy in your neighborhood.

Whoever it is, though, needs to be stopped and the best way to stop them from hacking your site is to increase your level of security. Make sure your blog passwords, CMS passwords, and web host logins are super difficult to guess. Make sure your passwords are at least 8 characters with two of those characters being capital letters, at least two being numerals, and two being special characters. Those kinds of passwords are difficult to guess. Single word passwords are easy.

Learn something about web security and make sure that you password protect sensitive folders on your website. Also, don’t allow anyone the ability to write to your files on your server. Set your server settings to “read” and don’t allow your software to change them except in rare cases. Ask your network administrator before changing those. Keep your security tight and hackers will have a harder time getting in, even if their friendly and buy you a cup of coffee.