Haven’t done one of these in a while but since it is Friday the 13th I thought I would scare everyone with my prose and thoughts.

On Monday if you saw my post one of my client’s website was under a brute force login attack. It started at 5:42 am CST and didn’t finish until 9:06 pm on Tuesday night. The attack came from computers widespread from Thailand, Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt and more. There were none from the United States. The Wordfence plugin did it’s job and locked out the users since they were using incorrect logins. I was able to go back afterwards and make the IP Address bans permanent.

The week before WordPress released version 4.9.7 which fixed some bugs that could have been exploited by hackers. If you have not updated to the latest version please do so immediately.

On Wednesday I tried out Uptime Robot which can notify you if your site goes down. Simple and easy to use there is a free tier that allows you to monitor up to 50 websites. If you have multiple sites on one shared hosting account you only need to monitor one site. It checks every 5 minutes. If you are running a higher traffic or ecommerce site you may want to go with one of the paid tiers which give you more options and checks the site more often.

That is the roundup for this week. Have a great weekend!