Billboard Insider knows from experience the importance of securing your website.  He spent two weeks in February fending off a hack.  Here are 8 simple things to make your outdoor advertising website secure.

• Install two part verification to access your host.  Any time you want to login to your email you need to enter your user name, password and a unique code which is texted to your mobile phone.  This means a hacker has to control your computer and your phone to get control of your websites.

• Hide your website owner’s, name, address, phone and email on the icann whois lookup page.  Godaddy makes you pay $10 extra a year for this but it’s worth it.  Google grants anonymity to all domain buyers who use its service.   Here’s what the masked details look like if you hide your info.

• Install the Sucuri wordpress security plugin if you use a wordpress theme and scan your website for viruses once a week.

• Install a firewall and blacklist servers in India, Russia, Afghanistan, Turkey and China because this is where most hacks come from.  My sucuri firewall allows me to do this with the click of a mouse.

• Don’t call your site administrator “Administrator”  or “Admin” or your company name.  People will try to login to your website as “admin” or “administrator” and guess your password.

• Place users in a timeout if they have a certain number of failed password guesses.  This will prevent bots for trying massive numbers of passwords to access your website.

• Use a unique 9+ character strong password with numbers, letters, large and small caps and symbols.  Random password generator (www.passwordsgenerator.net).  Don’t do what Insider did before which is to use the same password for all your websites.  Insider learned the hard way.

• Don’t store your passwords on your computer.  Use a cloud based password manager or a key drive.

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