#5 Getting hacked if you don’t do website updates!

shamelessly QUICK chick
shamelessly QUICK chick
#5 Getting hacked if you don't do website updates!
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Let’s talk about the worst case scenario … being hacked. We spoke recently about whether or not you need to keep your website up to date. And something I didn’t focus on was what can happen if you don’t keep your website up to date. I try not to scare monger when it comes to clients and I try not to make you know the worst case scenario sound like a likely scenario because it really isn’t. But it does happen. It just happened over the weekend to one of my clients. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the worst case scenario so that you know exactly why you need to do those updates.

How bad would it be for your business if not only did your website go down, but your emails started being blocked?

Pretty bad, right? Please prioritise updating your website, it is your first line of defence and very necessary.

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Read full transcript

Hi, this is Chantal from one day webs. And this is your shamelessly quick check podcast. Let’s talk about the worst case scenario – being hacked. We spoke recently about whether or not you need to keep your website up to date. And something I didn’t focus on was what can happen if you don’t keep your website up to date. I try not to scare monger when it comes to clients and I try not to make the worst case scenario sound like a likely scenario because it really isn’t. But it does happen. It just happened over the weekend to one of my clients. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the worst case scenario so that you know exactly why you need to do those updates. Why you need to prioritize that. And if you don’t have the time or the skill to prioritize it, why you need to outsource it. So this is a a scenario, I wouldn’t say it’s a likely scenario. Again, it’s not something that’s guaranteed to happen if you don’t keep your website up to date. I’m not here to scare monger you. But it is a possible outcome. So worst case scenario, you haven’t been keeping your website up to date, and what happens, you get hacked. You may not even know you’ve been hacked until it happens a few weeks later. And what can happen is your website can go down or it can start redirecting to some random website selling some sort of medical whatever. Basically, it can just do some really undesirable things. Now imagine if you’ve got a membership site, you’ve got people logging into your website, and they can’t access the content that they’re paying you for. This is an awful, awful outcome. This is what happened to one of my clients this weekend. So you really, really need to keep your website up to date. And most especially if you have an e commerce store or you have a membership website, or you have a website, you’re blogging on often.

What can happen if your website is hacked? Well, you can lose it. If it’s a bad enough hack and it can’t be cleaned. You can lose your website – all those months, weeks years of work can go away. If your hack can’t be cleaned. That would be an awful outcome. What else can go wrong? Your domain can be blacklisted because Google pics up that there are all sorts of untoward malware, etc. on your website, and you get blacklisted. They are loads and loads of blacklisting companies and one by one, they add your website to it. Okay, so your website goes down because it’s blacklisted. What’s the big deal? Well, this affects your email as well, because now your whole domain is blacklisted. So suddenly you emails on going through to clients, because when you try and send them an email, their email hosting provider is picking up that your domain is blacklisted for spam and they stop your email right there in its tracks. So your email stops working, your website stops working. How many of you have your businesses that rely on your website and your email? Surely that is most of us, right? So without scaremongering, because that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m just trying to educate. Please keep your websites up to date. It’s your first line of defense. Your first line of defense and preventing this horrible story from happening is keeping your website up to date. The other thing I really encourage you to do is to make sure wherever your website is hosted that your host is backing up your website so that you could potentially roll back to a backup prior to the hack. And first prize, you make sure that you are backing up your website to a cloud service off of your website server. Now understand totally that this can be totally gobbledygook, I get it. I would really encourage you to go on to my website and have a look at my website care plan page, you can subscribe there to a mailing list which will send you a series of emails that takes you through the things that you need to be doing on your website to ensure that you keeping your website up to date.You’ll get a PDF with a checklist of things you need to be doing on a weekly basis. And it will also take you through how you go about doing that. If you struggle to do it or you don’t have the time to do it, remember I’m always here. You’re welcome to sign up for a care plan with me especially if you’re a past client. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me and do that. So little bit of scaremongering, I really hate doing this, but it’s the reality. I had a client this weekend, they were hacked, they have a membership site, it was really, really awful. And as of Tuesday morning, we’re still doing the last little finishing touches to make sure that the website is back up and running. And they just weren’t aware of the dangers involved, and also weren’t aware that the website was out of date, they assumed that their host was going to notify them that their website was out of date and that’s not the case. Your website is your responsibility. Once your developer or your designer has handed the keys over to you, it’s over to you really, and you need to be keeping it up to date regularly. And if you can’t do that, you need to outsource it to somebody that can do it for you, be it me or somebody else. So there is a little bit about what can go wrong. If you don’t keep your website up to date. Hacking is real. It happens. This hack that affected my client this weekend affected over 50,000 websites around the world within the span of five days. So don’t be a statistic. Try and protect yourself. The best way to do that is to keep your website up to date. And if you can’t do that, or don’t have the skills to do that, please do yourself a favor and outsource it. What is losing your business domain and email worth to you? I think you would probably answer that question and say I would rather pay the small fee to have somebody update my website and have that first line of defense taken care of. So if you enjoyed this podcast, please give me a five star rating, if you would like to that would be amazing. And we will chat again in the next podcast.

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