WordPress Security for Home Business Bloggers

Why is WordPress security important to you as a home business blogger?

Perhaps you have a WordPress blog set up to build and promote your personal brand. Maybe you publish a blog that highlights your products and opportunity, or one that provides training and success tips.

Whatever your purpose, keeping your blog safe and secure is easy to ignore. Frankly, most of us prefer to just set up our blogs and publish our content. We like to think that our web hosting company will take care of security and protect our blogs from attack.

While a good hosting company will have safeguards and mechanisms in place to help prevent malicious attacks, they can’t do everything for you. Today, the art of hacking has become very sophisticated and refined. Many hackers who might attack your blog aren’t doing it against you personally, they just enjoy the challenge and go after random targets.

The fact is, if you don’t take care to protect your work, a lot can go right down the drain and may not be recoverable.

Following are some WordPress security plugins that I use, and I highly recommend you consider some or all of these to help protect your own home business blog. Note that all of these can be found in the wordpress.org plugin directory, and can be searched for and installed from inside your WordPress installation. Just log in to WordPress, click on “Plugins”, then click on “Add New” and search on the following names.

WP Security Scan

WP Security Scan (by WebsiteDefender) scans your WordPress blog for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. This plugin will look for problems with passwords, file permissions, database security, a certain type of user you shouldn’t have, and more.

As with any other plugin, be sure to read the documentation carefully and understand what you are doing. Once you get everything set up properly, the plugin runs in the background to protect your blog around the clock.

AntiVirus for WordPress

AntiVirus for WordPress (by Sergej Mueller) protects your blog against certain types of exploits and spam injections. It is very simple to install and the settings are minimal. It runs quietly in the background for you.

BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security (by Edward Alexander), technically speaking, protects your website from XSS, CSRF, Base64_encode and SQL Injection hacking attempts. Okay, you probably don’t care about all that. Simply put, the plugin was created as a simple, and one click solution to add .htaccess website security protection for your WordPress blog. This gives you additional protection against hacking attempts, and like the other plugins, it is pretty much hands off after the initial setup.

Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner

The Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner (by Peter Butler) will scan your wp-content directory for instances of outdated and insecure versions of the “timthumb script”, and lets you automatically upgrade them with a single click. Doing so will protect you from hackers looking to exploit this particular vulnerability.

This is a small script for cropping, zooming and resizing web images that has historically been included with many WordPress themes. Hackers discovered a way to exploit a vulnerability in this script, thus rendering countless blogs subject to attack.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup (by Austin Matzko) is not a security plugin, but I highly recommend it because you can set it to automatically backup your WordPress database daily. I have my backup emailed to me each day. Each time I get a backup, I keep it and delete the previous one. Well worth the trouble to help ensure that you can recover your most critical data if something bad happens to your blog.

I hope this WordPress security information is helpful to you.

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