Prevention is better than cure. It’s a cliche we often hear, perhaps even more in the last two years when we were inundated with ads and information on ways to keep ourselves healthy and avoid COVID. I heard it frequently when we were out of the country, but it was meant to say better to plan ahead than deal with problems later.
Five years ago, my website started to get hacked. The first hacker thought it would be funny to embed a link for Cialis in the site’s header. It was annoying because I didn’t know how to access it and had to get my website guy to fix it. To my relief, it only took a few days for the link to be removed. Cialis isn’t what I had in mind when I called my company Embrace Your Destiny. 😉
A year or two later, my website got hacked again. The hackers took over my website this time and had content in a language I didn’t understand. The best part of this incident was that the hacker actually had the nerve to send me a message on Facebook to let me know they hacked my site. When I went to their page, they listed all the sites they had hacked, and I reported them to Facebook but never heard anything else about it.
After getting hacked twice, I spoke with my website developer, and we made some changes. One of the things he did was install a widget that notifies me when someone unsuccessfully attempts to log into my website. The first few failed attempts lock them out for 20 minutes. If they return and make more failed attempts, they’re locked out for 24 hours.
I don’t know why, but receiving the failed attempts makes me smile. I’m still annoyed that people are trying to hack my site, but I’m happy that they’re no longer successful in their attempts.
One of the reasons my site was getting hacked was because I was one of those people who used simple passwords so that I could remember them. Now, I used a complicated combination of numbers and letters that would take someone a really long time to figure out. While I used to be annoyed when websites ask for passwords with a capital letter, a lower case letter, and a special character, I get it now. Simplicity isn’t meant for everything 😉
Prevention is better than cure is a mindset that can apply to all areas of our lives. It’s better to prevent problems from happening rather than try them later. Maybe that means taking time to think things through instead of making hasty decisions. It could be as simple as making sure your passwords aren’t predictable. ❤️