One of my websites got hacked.
This behaviour pisses me off.
The hackers are skilled enough to build their own websites and generate all the money they want, but they think it's funny or think they are so clever that they hack other people's sites instead.
The thing that annoyed me the most was that they didn't hack the WordPress website.
They hacked the cpanel and got access to about 20 websites at once.
Fortunately, I caught the hack before they had done what they started to do and shut them down.
I had to go through every site and every folder to remove the two embedded files in them all.
It took about 6 hours to clean them out manually.
Then I changed the passwords for the cpanel and the websites to block future access.
Over the last 10 -20 years, I have had several sites hacked, mostly by script kiddies who really don't know what they're doing, so they were easy to fix.
This one was a bit more difficult, and I don't know what they were attempting to do, but hopefully, I killed their fun.
This is how I secure my WordPress sites.
Set the log-in details to have a different username than admin, but I set the nickname to admin, set the password to a good one.
I use the Wordfence plugin to monitor my sites, the free version is fine.
I also use the WPbruiser plugin to stop spam attacks.
OK, so what's a good password?
The problem with most password tools and sites is that they want 14 characters with numbers, symbols, letters and at least one capital letter.
Then you can't remember them.
Make it easy for yourself.
Create a standard part that you use in all your passwords, which uses symbols and numbers.
For example - !779934!
Then you add to that the main part of the URL for the website you are logging into.
If that's https://google.com, then add the google part somewhere in your default password.
That could be !770034!google or google!779934! or !google779934! etc.
Be consistent with your pattern, and you'll have a unique password for every site that you'll remember.
By the way, I don't use that pattern, so don't try hacking my sites or accounts with it ;-).
Regards,
Brent,
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