If you’re anything like me, you’ve got your routines. I’m the first up in our family: I go downstairs, put the kettle on, go into the office, turn the PCs on, go make a cup of tea and take it to my wife in bed.
When we’ve got the breakfast and the school run over I’m back in the office. I check email, new sales and normally fire up Tweetdeck too to have in the background.
Throughout the course of the day I’ll go to PayPal also, and AWeber and maybe Facebook, log into a few of my blogs, Amazon, eBay, check a few forums… well, you get the picture.
Nearly all of the sites I visit regularly require me to input my login credentials. I used to have a book that I stored them all in, but it was getting messy and confusing, especially after altering email addresses and passwords. Even when it did work, it took time to find the right page and input the right password. When you consider the amount of sites that needed that little book it was a fair chunk of time I spent inputting the data. I knew I needed a better system, but it was one of those things I was putting off.
Then one day, disaster.
ALL of our blogs got hijacked. Overnight, ALL of them were flagged by Google as ‘possible attack sites’. Someone had somehow buried a redirect script in the wordpress system files and it took days to sort it out.
The financial impact both in terms of sales and time lost may not have been great, but the thought that this could happen so easily, so quickly was quite disturbing.
What was the cause? I narrowed it down to my own PC being the weak link. Although I have antivirus protection I had somehow installed a piece of malware that monitored the small program I used to use for uploading files to our sites. They had stolen all my login credentials for our WordPress sites.
I wasn’t sure if it was a keylogger or if it just attacked this one FTP program, but once I’d cleared my PC of malware and viruses (not an insignificant task), changed all my passords and usernames, I set to work in preventing it from happening again. (Oh yeah, and I had to ask Google to review all of our sites – what a pain!)
Anyway, onto the preventative solution. First on the list was a product by Craig Desorcy called Blog Lockdown – an invaluable resource in helping anyone secure their WordPress blogs. With Craig’s advice I managed to secure my FTP work and install cyberlocks on our blogs. If I’d implemented the steps outlined in Blog Lock Down BEFORE I got attacked I would have saved myself a lot of grief and down time. Craig also recommended another security tool called Roboform – and this has been a revelation.
Roboform, in its simplest form, is a password manager, but to me it’s so much more. Not only will it encrypt and store all your passwords and usernames, it also acts as a great bookmark organiser. Once I’ve entered my password into RoboForm I never have to enter another username or password for the myriad of sites I log into every day. (Roboform’s password is also entered via a virtual keyboard – you just use your mouse so any keylogging malware would never be able to hack it.)
Roboform will also complete forms at the click of a button and can safely store personal details such as address, telephone numbers, bank details and credit card numbers. I love it when faced with a huge online form that I can simply click one button and all the fields are automatically completed – safe, secure and quick!
If you do any financial transactions online; Amazon, Play, grocery shopping, then Roboform is not a luxury but an absolute MUST.
I collect little gadgets and useful bits of software all the time – through a process of natural selection most of them lie unused, forgotten about on my hard drive, but Roboform is just part and parcel of my daily routine. After the breakfast, school run and a cup of tea, switching on RoboForm is always the next task.
You can try Roboform for free – it comes with my highest of recommendations and it’s well worth giving it a go
