“Hacked I tell ya. The whole world is coming to and end because we’re all being hacked” said an insane man I was passing on the street the other day. But that reminded me of two things,

WordPress updates and Wordfence.

What is WordFence and why do I care?

You care if you’re using a WordPress website. And if you are, you care.

You care, a lot.

The reason that you care so much is because your WordPress website may be vulnerable to hackers if you’re not using protection software.

www.stockfreeimages.com
“Can you toss me the keys”

At Techretries, we work with Wordfence because they continue to be responsive and informative when we need them to be.

While no anti-virus/anti-piracy software stays perfect for long,

Wordfence has been around for years solving and resolving hacks and bugs in WordPress systems.

However, it is important to note that WordPress alone works hard to keep its software up to date and void of hackable flaws but this is not always enough. Especially if you don’t have the current version of WordPress up and running.

www.stockfreeimages.com
“She still runs perty good though. We call her ol’ Penn Station.”

Every time WordPress or your plugins issue an update and you don’t immediately run that update, your entire WordPress website is at risk. While Wordfence can help protect your site during a lapse before updating, it’s not a guarantee.

Usually, this conversation only comes up when a website is grossly out of date.

But lately, even when things are only a version behind for a day or two, things have been getting weird…

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“Yeah? Well maybe you look weird to me!”

So weird that the mainstream media is reporting on the number of “Wordpress blogs defaced in hack attacks.”

According to this article by the BBC 1.5 million pages have been defaced while WordPress scrambled to “prompt firms to update their software to a fixed version.” This is a relatively small number compared to the 72.4 Million WordPress sites online in 2012. Even with numbers from four years ago, 2% of sites being hacked is very small. After all, WordPress is an open source Content Management System utilized by all kinds of people and businesses the world over.

And this is not the first time in recent history that WordPress has been in the News. If you’ll recall, the so-called “Panama Papers” belonging to a law firm using a WordPress website, featured the Revolution Slider, to show off some neat pics. Unfortunately, hackers were able to exploit a weakness in the Revolution Slider making public documents that revealed financial holdings of very important people. Including three politicians for their offshore (possibly illegal) financial holdings: the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, Russian President Putin, and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

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“Those seem like some pretty key players…”

One out of three resigned due to the fiasco. And while the hack and subsequent leak may have revealed illegal financial activity. The point is that the need to secure our WordPress sites is vastly more important than it used to be.

Don’t wait for something to happen before you take action. At Techretries, we provide our customers with regular update services to avoid missing the latest update and leaving vulnerabilities wide open to hackers.

It doesn’t matter what kind of content you manage on your WordPress site, use Wordfence and run your WordPress updates.

If you have extra questions about WordPress or Wordfence, send us a message.

Maybe you would like us to implement WordPress or Wordfence for you, send us a message.

Or you might need something completely different. You guessed it, send us a message.

We love to brainstorm with people about all the different ways of getting a new business up and running or onto the next level.