Staying Safe Online: The Essential Cybersecurity Checklist for Your Blog

Running a blog can be a great hobby, or even a lucrative business if you pull it off right. In any case, it can also become a huge security risk when you consider how much information you’re exposing to the public. Sometimes, a hacker obtaining access to the internal workings of your blog can have a devastating impact on your private life. It’s important to know how to set things up in a secure and efficient manner that allows you to defend yourself against the most common attacks.

Use a Unique Password

This might sound like a useless tip, but you’d be surprised how many people keep reusing the same password for everything, including accounts where security is of critical importance. Even if your password is strong – a good mix of upper - and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols – that won’t matter much if an attacker manages to compromise another website where you have an account with the same password.

Even hashed passwords are occasionally exploitable, so don’t trust the security of any company to keep your passwords private. You should ideally apply this rule to everything you do with your computer and other digital devices, not just your blog.

Separate Accounts for Shared Blogs

If you’re running your blog together with other people, it can be a good idea to give everyone their own accounts with specific privileges. This is particularly true when you don’t know much about your partners and aren’t sure how much you can trust them. If you set things up correctly, nobody should be able to damage anything other than their own content, and the blog itself is going to stay safe.

This is not just about trust between you and your partners either. It also aligns with the previous tip. Even if you’re following appropriate security practices and have a unique password for your blog account, you might still get compromised through someone else if they have sufficient permissions for the blog. You can’t control how others treat their own accounts, but you can limit what they have access to.

Connecting Safely on the Go

Sometimes, you may need to connect to your blog through an unsecured device or network. Logging in through your Android phone while connected to an unfamiliar network (like a restaurant’s Wi-Fi) can be a huge security risk. Even if you’re running proper encryption. Using a VPN is a great way to avoid any issues in this area, and it’s also a good practice to follow in general.

It’s hard to know who might be listening in on your connection these days. Thus, a reliable VPN service can go a long way towards keeping your information secure. Even if you’re not dealing with any particularly sensitive details, a VPN can still be a worthwhile investment. There are many good VPN apps for Android users out there who would often need to use a secured VPN connection on the go.

Back Up Frequently

This is another tip that many people brush off as an obvious one, and yet many also fail to follow. Having a regular backup plan in place is the only way to ensure that your information is safe no matter what happens. As long as you backup your data to at least two different locations – ideally physically separate from each other – there’s next to no risk that you might lose it at any point.

There are various specialized solutions available on the market today that can allow you to backup your data with a few clicks. Thus, it’s a good idea to look around and compare different offers if you’re still not running anything of that sort.

Be Careful with Ad Networks

Ads can be a good way to supplement your income and turn your blog into something more than a hobby, but be careful with the specific networks you’re using. There have been various reports of malicious operators inserting malware into their ads on networks with poor quality control. So, if you’re considering a new partnership of this type, do a lot of careful research into the company’s reputation. And when in doubt, always play it safe with a familiar and trusted network.

It’s impossible to keep your blog one hundred percent protected against all attacks these days, especially against a determined intruder targeting you specifically. But you can still do a lot to improve the general safety of your operations. This will keep out a majority of people with malicious intentions. Always be on the lookout for new developments in this field as well, as staying informed is a must if you want to improve your chances at repelling attackers in the long run.