Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

A few days ago I wrote about our website having been potentially hacked by way of our WordPress blog. After performing a couple of preventative measures I decided to contact our web host, Media Temple to see if there was anything else we could do.

Jeff’s Advice To Me… And You
Jeff, who provided excellent customer service, and I spoke about our situation. To help you with your website, here is the rundown I received.

• Stay on top of your blog and its members. Try to catch possible issues early before users have a chance to do harm to your website.
• If you can do it, turn off the “anyone can register” option under general settings of your WordPress blog.
• Change your password frequently and use something alphanumeric with lowercase letters, capital letters, and typographical symbols.
• Check out Google Webmaster Tools. In general they provide good information for your website. An added benefit, is that if you have any red flags from being hacked they will let you know here.
• Run virus scans on your computer to make sure you do not have any viruses or spyware. This is a “just-in-case” measure for extra protection for you, your computer, and your website.

We Are Not Just About Security
I know a lot of the past few blog posts have been about personal, blog, and online security. Please know this is just a temporary subject given all of the things that have been happening around Triune Designs and the web in general. We should be resuming our “normal programming” quite soon.

Oh, the search engines. I think they are my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. Writing posts that might ring true for people engaging in this blogging community and with people cruising along on the search engine highway comes with a slight risk. The wrong people will also find this blog.

I have two examples come to mind.

The Iconic Symbol
The first is with a blog post I did on Twitter a few months ago. I had a good conversation with some readers and got a few links coming to the website. Awesome… and then the junk came. Apparently, the icon was picked up on Google images… and a few bloggers liked the it enough to steal bandwidth hotlink the image. I assume a few of them did it by accident, but either way it was pretty annoying and required a bit of angling so they would not use my resources.

Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Me
The second example brings us to today: our blog kind of got hacked yesterday. I believe it has to do with some of the recent blog post about web security. So far, I cannot tell that anything actually happened, but two “people” registered on the blog as subscribers. They/he/she did this despite my not having user registration access on the main part of the website. After a quick Google search I found that one of the email addresses is associated with a person who uses that newly acquired access to break into the website and do (presumably) bad things.

I guess I might have to try and increase the security on the blog. Between that and prayer, hopefully nothing bad will go down on the back-end of the website. Stay tuned!

Welcome to Triune Designs, Inc.’s marketing blog! This blog will be updated on a (mostly) weekly basis with articles/thoughts on topics ranging from print marketing and graphics design to internet-based marketing and strategies. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoy writing them. Until the next time…