I can tell you from personal experience that being hacked is not a nice experience. I was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on your view of things, that I suffered a double hack. The first to one of my WordPress blogs (not this one fortunately), the second  was to the same site but was a malware attack.

When I say fortunate, the malware attack was reported and my site shut down by my webhost. It was a tough job tracking down the actual malware but it alerted me to check through everything else. That is when I found the WordPress attack.

What is even more galling is that I could have prevented it with just a few minutes work. If you have a WordPress blog I hope you read the notices on the Dashboard page. There have been a lot of notices about attacks on older versions of WordPress. Upgrade to the latest version ASAP is my recommendation.

As to my site, my second piece of advice is also just as simple. Change your passwords frequently and make sure the passwords are easy for you to remember but long enough to be hard to hack. Include a mix of capitals, lower case, numbers and symbols. I got lazy and was using a six digit password which, on reflection, was easy to hack. Not now I can tell you.

It is very easy to take your blog for granted. We sail along posting each and every day – most of don’t give much regard to passwords or upgrading our sites. The latest versions of WordPress make upgrading much easier. My message to all:

Don’t take your blog or site for granted – make security at least a weekly priority. If you don’t, somewhere, sometime, when you least expect it, someone will come along and knock it out – you could potentially lose the lot. It’s your site – it’s in your hands.