Urgent! You may lose your website, and expose your financial data if you ignore this warning!

• How you can lose millions if allow hackers to gain access to your WordPress website
• 3 ways hackers can gain access to your website
• Three Proven Secrets to prevent hackers from accessing your website.

I never thought I would be exposed to hackers or experience a website hacking issue until the day it eventually happened. As a website owner, I have previously spent thousands of naira buying various virus scanners and other website protection tools which I didn’t understand or implement correctly

Until that fateful morning when I tried to access my website and it has been hacked. The hacker even left me with a message that I have to pay about $10,000 if I ever want to access my website again.

While I was still dealing with the realization of what has just hit me, I decided to check another website I hosted on the same hosting platforms, about 8 of them to be sure that they are all okay.

That was the moment I realized that all my website on this particular shared hosting account was completely hacked.

I have just lost a total of Ten (10) active websites to hackers.

The bigger challenge here was not just losing the website, but all registered customers’ and users’ information such as; credit card info, phone number, email address, and even location has been exposed to those who will try to defraud or steal from them.

You can’t possibly imagine the impact of this both on my business, and on customers’ business. Let me paint it in the simplest way possible;

• Access to stored credit/debit card information on your website gives them access to customer’s money, which can be stolen
• Access to personal data; such as email address, Name, and personal telephone numbers can be used to perpetrate a crime or defraud unsuspecting website users
• Your website information/traffic may be diverted to a malicious website where they are deceived to do business with a fake website and identity

In 2020 alone, over 10,000 websites in Nigeria were hacked, sadly, a marginal less than 10% of these websites knew about the hack or what to do to rectify it.

Now think of the number of users’ data that would have been exposed during this process? Imagine the magnitude of fraud that would have been committed with customers’ personal information from these websites?

Since there are no structures on the ground that allows Nigerians to seek justice or prevent this, many website owners and users who go through this horrific experience do not report it to any authority, hence the little awareness it gets compared with other issues on the internet.

As a cybersecurity expert with years of experience in web automation, I have seen many unsuspecting website owners go through this terrible experience over and over again. When it eventually happens, they are usually helpless, with no direction on what to do. s

My question is, do you want to continue to be vulnerable to these attacks, leaving you with the chance of being hacked?

If your answer is no; then let me show you how they get into your website in the first place.

1. If you used a shared hosting account from a ‘not so reliable hosting company’; This alone accounts for about 50% of making your website vulnerable to being hacked easily. A shared hosting account is one where you and other website owners use the same resources to host your websites through your hosting company. Why this plan is particularly popular Is because it is a lot cheaper/affordable compared with getting a private hosting account. What this implies however is, that your DNS and other information are public.
   
   Other people on the shared account, especially those who specialize in the hacking website can easily see your system core files. They can use this to crawl into your website by adding so much malware. This is the only reason I always recommend Bluehost as a preferred hosting account partner anytime people ask for their opinion on which hosting company should they use for the website.
2. Hiring incompetent developers, or those who do not have adequate knowledge about website security. If you built a custom application or website, paying particular attention to the security of the website is important. If your developers have not experienced a deep hack issue, they may end up leaving your website considerably vulnerable and easy to hack.
3. No maintenance plan for your website; this is particularly common with WordPress websites where users just leave plugins and scripts without updating them. This always creates a pathway for hackers to attack the website with malware carefully hidden in the hardcore files. These sometimes are also used to phish on customers’ information.

Three Proven Secrets to prevent hackers from accessing your website.

What can you do to protect your website, your personal information, and your customers/users’ information?

Choose a website hosting company that offers website protection services;

Increasingly, some website hosting service providers understand the need for the websites of their customers to be safe now that hacking is on the rise, they usually offer a protection plan for all websites on their platform.

If I may recommend one to you, I have been on Bluehost for more than 5 years now personally, this is beyond commission or affiliate review but a completely personal experience with them. They provide excellent website protection plans which are both free and paid for. Even with the free version, it seems adequate for your basic need as either a website designer or a website owner. They also have robust support in case you run into any troubles and you need professional help to assist you to resolve them.

Hire the right developer or designer:

Also Read: Plans to hire website designer in Nigeria? 3 things you must consider

While you consider the ability to write proper code and design a functional website that is attractive and responsive, what should perhaps also top your list is, the safety of the website and the data on the website. Here is the danger when you do not pay special attention to this; you can either lose the website file completely to hackers and/or lose your customer information completely to the hackers, making their personal and financial information completely exposed.

You need to ensure that any development you hope to use has adequate know-how for building a completely safe website by implementing the best security and safety practices with relevant tools that can further secure your website

Run maintenance on your website as required;

Many people believe that once a website has been built and is functional, you do not need to maintain the website. This is even more common among WordPress website owners who will have a long list of plugins, themes, and scripts without recent updates.  Developers of such third-party scripts continuously watch out for vulnerability and fix such and constantly release updates.

If you have many outdated plugins on your website, it’s like leaving the backdoor of your website open for thieves to come in. In fact, for WordPress-related hacks, this sole reason is responsible for more than 90% of hacks that occurs during this process.

Conclusion

The reality here is, website hacking is increasingly more lucrative, both the big website owners and even small websites are now the target of hacks whose sole interest is to steal customers’ information, majorly financial information, and scam them as well.

The resultant effect is always devastating and huge, which can run into millions of Naira lose to you and your website users.

It is your responsibility to ensure your website is fully protected which will completely reduce the likelihood of being hacked, protect your reputation and damage it will do to your brand if customers’ information is leaked, and most importantly, give you complete peace of mind that you require.

If you find my recommendation useful, you can use this link to change your hosting account to a Bluehost account that offers complete protection against hackers and provide you with robust one-on-one support if you ever need to get help.