alphabet-blog-sI had a couple of ideas in my A to Z list for S. But then last week, my blog was hacked.

It wasn't major, and doesn't appear to have been malicious, and probably no one but me even noticed. The only reason I realised was that I checked my blog on my ipad in bed, watching as it loaded, only to see a strange page of links and spamy type words flash up for a second.

I tell you, I panicked! I jumped out of bed and spent over an hour making sure it was clean and securing it to make sure this didn't happen again. Sure I'd heard of other people having their blogs hacked, but I didn't believe it would ever happen to me! But apparently this month there has been a huge spike in the number of attacks on WordPress blogs.

How did I fix it?

Well, at first I thought I was going to have to go through all the individual pages to find this strange bit of code, and given how many pages and templates wordpress has, that was going to take AGES. But then another thought occured to me, and I went looking for and found an Anti-Malware plugin.

Phew. This nifty little plugin found that spammy little bit of code, and removed it for me!

Then I did a bit of searching on how to prevent this in the future!

I found another nifty little plugin called Better WP Security and though I haven't turned on everything in the plugin (some of it is over my head), I do feel a little more confident about the security of my site.

This plugin logs access attempts, and bans people if they attempt to login more than a certain number of times. I've already had two people banned!

Another plus is that it also lists 402 errors that occur on my page (they can be a sign of people trying to find a way in if they're searching for obscure links), and this has helped me fix a couple of broken links!

How secure is your website/blog? Have you ever had your page hacked? Any good advice on securing your site?

All this month I’m participating in the A-Z blogging challenge, writing a blog post for each letter of the alphabet, on every day of the month except Sundays. Check back regularly to see what else I have in store for you.