“Hack Prevention versus Hack Repair," an Interview with Jim Walker
An Interview with Jim Walker, http://HackRepair.com
and Website Creation Workshop, Christina Hills
“Hack Prevention versus Hack Repair”
Christina:
Hello and welcome this is Christina Hills with the Website Creation Workshop and welcome to our October expert call, Hack Prevention vs. Hack Repair.
I am thrilled to have Jim Walker here who will be teaching us and talking to us about the things we can do as business owners to help prevent our sites getting hacked in the first place, how to figure out if you’ve been hacked and what to do if you have and how to repair your site.
Let me introduce Jim. I’ve known Jim for a while, he lives in San Diego with me and I’ve met him at multiple WordPress meet ups. He’s been a website security expert and website hosting service provider for over 16 years. He lives in San Diego, California and his current passion is WordPress just like me.
He manages HackRepair.com, a malware cleanup and website security services company and Hack Guard, a WordPress security and management service. He’s the guy I’m hiring to help me in one of my accounts that I think has been compromised. I wanted to invite him today to teach all of us what are the things we can do as business owners to prevent our sites from being hacked.
Now we are business owners and not designers and web masters, but I know there are a lot of little things we can do to protect ourselves. So we’ll interact together and be taking your questions. So Jim welcome to the call.
Jim:
Hi Christina, Jim Walker here with HackRepair.com and thank you for having me on. I’m loving this. I like talking about security so where do you want to start?
Christina:
I want to start with the rise I’ve seen in hacker attacks and problems like that that I’ve seen on the internet. Is the rise in malware hack attacks is it just that I’m more observant of it or has it gone up? To me, it feels as if it has gone up. Would you say they’re attacking WordPress sites more or just sites in general?
Jim:
I think in general hackers have always been around but content management systems like WordPress and Joomla all have their inherent security issues that don’t necessarily relate to the software themselves but relate to things like people using over easy passwords and installing stuff and then forgetting to update the stuff and hackers are taking advantage of it.
That’s the reason you’re seeing an increased rise because folks are having the web designer design their site or they design it themselves and they think it doesn’t need to be updated or that it’s like cement and you pour it and walk on it. But the truth is a website is a living thing and if you’re not constantly at least monthly or quarterly reviewing and making sure your scripts are updated you might find yourself with the problems a lot of people are finding today in that their sites are being compromised.
Christina:
And that’s exactly what happened to me which I’m embarrassed to admit. In one of my web hosting accounts I put up a site that I forgot about. It was a small site that I wasn’t really paying attention to and I wasn’t keeping plug-ins updated and that’s how I believe my site got hacked into.
Once that happened I said I have to pay more attention to this and now I’m much more diligent on getting things updated all the time and not building sites and forgetting about them. If I’m going to build a WordPress site I’m going to keep it active and if I decide I don’t need it anymore I’m going to delete that WordPress site.
It’s actually good and makes us tighten the ship up. I know Jim you have this great formula for hack prevention. Should we go through that formula?
Jim:
That would be great. I try to keep it simple. I don’t expect that anyone knows anything other than maybe how to log in to WordPress, for example, and add their content and pictures and that’s what it should be. In truth that’s what the internet presented, it gave us this nice medium.
But the downside is that we forget that just like in our own homes there are things we need to do keep them secure and you can’t just hope that someone won’t find the key under your mat. So you have to do things to prevent and maybe not put the key under the mat but put it under a rock...
Full transcript may be found at, https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/1159087...
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