WordPress Wednesday: Has Your WordPress Blog Been Hacked?

Hello and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday here on MorganLinton.com! Today I am going to talk about a topic that is (or at least it should be!) very important to all WordPress users, what I’m talking about is security. However I’ve written about WordPress Security before, so now I wanted to go a step further and talk about how to tell if you blog has already been hacked.

You can install all the security software you want but if your blog has already been compromised, they aren’t going to do a lot of good. Luckily, there are some great, free tools out there to help you determine if your blog has been hacked, sure it’s not good news, but don’t you want to know? If so read on!

There are a number of ways your blog could have been hacked without you ever knowing. Hacking used to mean taking down your site and putting up something menacing like a skull and crossbones with some strange hackers handle below it. Now hacking us much more covert since many hackers really just want some free link love from you and the longer your site continues to operate normally, the better for them.

I have used a number of tools to check to see if my blog has been compromised but I find that by combining two tools you can check for security holes and make sure that you are notified instantly if your blog is hacked. The first tool is WP Security Scan.

WP Security Scan is a free WordPress plugin that checks for vulnerabilities in the following areas:

  • Database Security
  • Version Hiding
  • Passwords
  • File Permissions
  • WordPress Admin Protection
  • Remove WP Generator code

This is a great plugin to have and run periodically. Of course this tool will only tell you if you have a security hole, it won’t necessarily tell you if your blog has been hacked, for that I recommend Sucuri.

Sucuri is a tool that not only scans your site to determine if it has been hacked, it also comes with a support team that will fix your site, and quickly. Not only will the Sucuri team fix your site, they’ll also resubmit it to search engines and help keep it secure going forward through a WordPress plugin. The cost is $89/year which really isn’t too bad when you think about how much a hacked site could cost you in downtime.

Combining WP Security Scan with Sucuri is a great way to make sure your site is locked down and safe from hackers. Along with checking for potential security flaws you also get the peace-of-mind knowing that if something does happen, you’ll be back up and running in no time.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton