Blogging Tips – Protecting Your Blogs & Online Assets from Scams & Phishing

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In my earlier article on how Online Phishing & Email Scams could cause a disaster to your online business, I concluded with the note that I will follow it up with a few simple ways that can help you save a lot of money & prevent majority of the problems caused by getting caught up in these online scams & phishing networks.

What follows is a practical approach on a small budget to help you protect your online blogs websites & other online assets.

Security Password: You must have heard this a million times, but it helps & does make a difference. Create a strong password, using alphabets, numbers & special symbols & about 8 – 12 characters long. Also remember to change this password every 3 months or so.

One common mistake that people make is to have the same password for more than one website or blog that they maintain. Bad idea! If you get caught on one, you get caught on all. It is best to have different login IDs and different passwords for the separate websites that you run.

If you are running Wordpress blog, be sure to have an equally strong password for your mySQL database. You set the password when you first install Wordpress but you can always go back & change it later on.

File Permissions & Access Priviledges: Check your files on the hosting server to see if any of them have a permission of ‘777′ which means that you can write & execute those files. The safest thing is to remove all ‘write’ & ‘execute’ access from the files that don’t need them.

If you use a software like FileZilla to FTP your files, simply clicking the right button on your mouse pointed on a file or a folder will show you the exisiting ‘Access Permissions’. You can change it on the fly.

Setting Up Mailboxes correctly: When yu register a domain or buy a hosting service, you get an email option by default. You may not be using it but the email server still exists. It is popularly called the SMTP server.

The email server contains your domain name (if you domain is mydomain.com, then your email server will be called mail.mydomain.com or something very similar). Phishing emails can often be routed through mail.mydomain.com server without you knowing it. Since it contains your domain name as the one that is sending / forwarding the scamming or phishing emails, it could land you in trouble.

Different hosting service providers have different ways to protect their email servers. Talk to them & find out what you need to do to prevent others from using your domain email server.

Using Professional Email Marketing Services: External professional email service providers are white listed with the majority of the ISPs. So even if your domain is under attack or worse, banned, you can still send emails to your readers & customers.

In the article Email & RSS Subscription Services I have recommended a few of the best & cost effective email service providers we have used.

Using the Best of the Breed Website Hosting Services: Even the best website hosting services cost less than $10 a month these days. If spending a couple of dollars a month more on the best could protect your online business & your web assets, I think you would be wise to do that.

The web hosting service providers are also impacted daily from these scams & phishing emails as well as the more worrisome hacks. The best of the breed takes all the security precautions on their end to help survive any such attacks. It is definitely safer to sign up with the best hosts & stop losing all you have.

Control External Access: Limit the number of people who can access the core technical areas of the heart of your business. Like who can sign in as an “Administrator” and modify settings & files on your host, or who can change passwords & email settings at the back end.

If you have outsourced your work, completely or partially, in whatever capacity, verify that your out-sourced partners have the proper security & access methods in place to access your sites from the backend.

Back Up your files & Data Frequently: This is not really a prevention but a way to bring your online blogs websites & business online again in a short time after you have been attacked.

Website hosting service providers provide various easy to use tools to back your data, database & files on a regular basis. If a disaster does strike, then you can ‘restore’ your blogs websites & other online assets from the latest backup files.

These are simple ways, under your control, that you can practice to control to prevent falling into the traps of these online scammers. Choosing the right website hosting service provider definitely is the first major step in the right direction.

Minimizing the risk with a separate email service provider helps to prevent sudden disruption to your business in case something fatal does happen to the host. And lastly, the best safe security practices that you use daily to prevent unwanted access to your core technical data & files should provide added cover to protect your online business.