The headline of this post is “I Got Hacked”… and I have been, several times over the course of my career as an internet professional. I recently had that experience with one of my servers, and I learned a lot… in fact one of our ICC Pro users hipped me to an amazing plugin, it’s called Spyder Spanker! (I don’t remember who it was but thanks a bunch!)
It’s called Spyder Spanker because there are a lot of bad spiders out there which continually spider all our blogs, drawing server resources, for good or bad. This thing basically stromg-arms these bad spiders out on their ears, and points them back at themselves (and a lot of other things!)
A spider is an internet robot, basically a piece of software that sits on a server somewhere and continually requests pages from your website, indexing your website link by link and page by page, sucking bandwidth from your account on a daily basis. You wouldn’t imagine how many of those are running until you get a tool like SS to reveal them to you (SS has an awesome control panel, on which you can monitor in real time what spiders are monitoring your site, or being turned away!)
There are also good spiders sucking up your bandwidth — you want good spiders to have access to your blog so you can get your pages indexed. But sometimes even they spider a little too much! SS will allow Googlebot and the other good spiders to have full access, or you can throttle them to 50% or whatever you want. You have full control.
Spyder Spanker comes with default settings to keep your blog completely visible to all good traffic and completely invisible to all bad traffic. This thing ROCKS I cannot recommend anything more heartily than I recommend Spyder Spanker, not only for the security reasons but also because it saves me money — I am paying for bandwidth on my websites so if I allow all these spiders to suck up my bandwidth then there goes my money out the window, for no good purpose — in fact I’m paying for these bad spiders to have access and suck up my bandwidth — the statistics show that these good and bad spiders can suck up to 50% of your total bandwidth! Baidu is a really bad one that you don’t want, and there are several others. SS shuts off access from all those bad spiders.
Spyder Spanker installs easily onto your WordPress blog, and once it’s installed, it starts right away to make all unwanted visitors BUZZ OFF. I mean, this thing is so cool — you can decide what internet header you want to send to unwanted visitors — you can tell them there’s a Server Error, Page Not Found, or even Permanently Moved back to their OWN IP ADDRESS! Just send them right back to their own ip. Or just send a “bugger off” “Not Wanted” header! Spyder Spanker permanently excludes ip blocks from certain specific countries from which most hack attacks come from, so it just eliminates whole ranges of threats from your blog’s internet landscape.
I can’t recommend this highly enough – have a look at it here:Â
(this is a bit.ly shortened url that will take you to the warriorforum)
Thanks for your time, and Blog Safely! My best,
Hugh
Web Dimensions, Inc.
Was hacked a week ago and decided to get Spyder Spanker and that was the best decision and investment I have done so far to protect my business against all those spammers and hackers and absolutely love the Honey Pot integration!
Dude .. I was the chap that let you know about SS during an ICCPro webinar .. in the chatbox. Haha! and I haven’t been hacked since installing. You can even throttle down the big G’s spider (50% or so) so they don’t eat up your bandwidth. Cool beans .. right?