WordPress Security Attacks, Google AdSense TOS, Google+ Comments, Speedlink 16:2013

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Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. Undoubtedly, one of the most noteworthy news this week is that of WordPress sites being hit by massive botnet attacks. Performance and security provider CloudFlare wrote on a blog post this week:

There is currently a significant attack being launched at a large number of WordPress blogs across the Internet. The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username “admin” and trying thousands of passwords. It appears a botnet is being used to launch the attack and more than tens of thousands of unique IP addresses have been recorded attempting to hack WordPress installs…

wordpress security attacksEveryone using WordPress should not only be concerned about “brute force attacks” but also ensure that adequate WordPress security measures are in place to minimize attempts. One big no no is definitely using the username “admin” and a weak password. Change you username now and please do avoid using “your sites name”, “your own name”, and “your domain name”. Those are also pretty much obvious. If you need to enhance your WordPress security, start on that link above, and install some simple security plugins, just to play it safe.

On a different front, Google has been busy this week launching or announcing several changes from their offered services. First up is the Google Affiliate network being killed. If you are using Google’s affiliate network, you should know that soon, it will be decommissioned. Time to make sure you don’t put up new links and eliminate the existing ones, just in case.

Better news from Google is the long awaited integration of Google+ in the comments area of our blogs. Google has rolled out this new feature and for now it is only available on blogger. All you have to do is to enable it. Good news and hopefully they will roll it out to other platforms as well. You can see it in action here. Just a reminder though. From what I can tell (based on a comment I left on Google’s blog), once you leave a comment on a Google+ enabled blog, you are “automagically” sharing that post to your G+ stream. Just be sure that’s your intention.

Finally, for Google AdSense users, an official announcement has been released this week. A new AdSense TOS (term of service) is underway and will be rolling out slowly to all users. Once you see a notification in your account, you have 30 days to accept it. I know many of you do not really take the time to read this stuff, but, if AdSense is worth your time, you should read the new TOS carefully.

As usual, in no particular order:

SEO/Search/Marketing/Analytics

Social/Blogging/Small Business Bites

More Cool Stuff and Other Roundups

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Do internal website links with exact match keyword anchor text hurt a website? These links help our users navigate our website properly. Are too many internal links with the same anchor text likely to result in a ranking downgrade because of Penguin? – Answer? Typically not …

That’s it! Enjoy, have a great weekend!

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

10 thoughts on “WordPress Security Attacks, Google AdSense TOS, Google+ Comments, Speedlink 16:2013”

  • Wow! I’m so looking forward to try this new g+ comment platform to see if it’s good, thanks for the news.

    • Welcome Jan. Let me know how it goes for you..

  • Hey DiTesco,
    Nice post and Thanks for sharing these important tips for wordpress security and for providing plugins for security. I really like this new feature offered by Google, it really seems interesting.

    • Welcome. If you are on WordPress, just make sure that you have the minimum security deterrents in there. Does not hurt to play it safe. Thanks for stopping by

  • And think about how many large sites have been broken into in the last year. If a hacker gets your password & login from one site, you’ve opened up every site you belong to.

  • Thank you just for this press and important information from google.
    Indeed, we are victims of brute strength and thank you for the generous advice.

  • Great list a usual DiTesco. 😉

    Thanks for listing my post my darling. Very much appreciated!!

    Hugs.

    • Very much welcome Michelle 🙂 Post is awesome and don´t know if you have noticed.. it is being repinned quite a lot of times on Pinterest. Hope that´s giving you a bit of traction 🙂

      Always good to see you around.. come back more often will you, lol

  • It’s most critical than in the past to safeguard WordPress websites, otherwise there’s the risk that they might be turn out to be used for criminal activities.

    I already had security measures in place to stay away from brute force penetration but after seeing in excess of 10K tries to logon into my blog in recent days I decided that whether or not they failed it wouldn’t harm having even more stringent security.

    There is now a Google Authenticator Plugin for WordPress. You could enable (or disable) it per user (admin, editor, etc). This plugin together with strong password is the best you can do to secure the back end. This is the plugin I installed for my website.

  • Hi Ditesco,this is a great post involving google adsense I really get confused everytime I head to the site. Now this post made things clear to me !
    thanks for sharing

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