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blocked IP

Who would think that a website like www.macvaugh.com would receive any attention from hackers. Well we have – and not just a little attention, but a lot. We keep no information on credit card numbers, social security numbers or anything of immediate monetary value. Our website does generate a fair amount of traffic for searchers looking for office retail or industrial space to rent or purchase – for example type in “office space for lease pasadena ca” in Google and we come up on the first page. Type in “retail space for lease pasadena ca” and we dominate the 2nd page.  All we potentially provide to a hacker is traffic.

The above table shows the hacking attacks on www.macvaugh.com ….IN THE LAST 2 DAYS!

Our tech guru offers the following advice.  If you have a website with WordPress, please be really careful recently. Here are several very basic tips that should help:

  1. DO NOT EVER set your username as “administrative”, “admin” or your company name! If your name is John Smith, “jsmith” would be a too-easy-to-be-cracked username as well. You can set your username as something you love to eat, such as “rockymountainoysters.” If hackers get your correct username, they would have more leverage to hack into your website from there!
  2. Set up the most complicated password that you can memorize with the combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols! This is common sense among all human beings on this planet earth. I don’t need to explain more about this.
  3. Get the plugin “Wordfence”! It has a lot of automatic blocking settings which are really helpful!
  4. Block the comment option. Unfortunately WordPress currently has some loopholes associated with comment function. I have heard quite some websites got hacked because of this. Please block this function until there’s better patch coming up.
  5. Back up your website constantly. Use some automatic backup plugin such as “BackWpup” and this will become really handy once you realize you have finally successfully been hacked! Don’t try to get rid of the hacker’s codes, because it would be pain in the neck to clean the codes completely and it takes forever. Just restore the whole website to a backup point that you are pretty sure the website is not hacked yet. Afterwards, most importantly, change all the usernames and passwords! Disable some unnecessary plugins to clean your system as well!

Hope these tips really help.

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