I wrote in the post  Do you really know who’s visiting your website? about how often hackers probe my websites. IT Security News has of today this: 5,914 blocked malicious login attempts / was 2092 on May 8th 2,182 spam comments blocked by Akismet. / was 2115 on May 8th The login attempts more than doubled in just 5 weeks. Of course, they are all automated attacks, so we can’t really speak of an effort from anyone’s site.   Why ? If a hacker “owns” a website he is able to do a few things:  Change content and possible deliver malware to your readers Host individual “sub-pages” or “sub-websites” in your blog and reference them from email campaigns or post spams. Send mail from your blog to just anyone, but the worst is when it sends to your subscribers. All are very bad things as they ruin your website’s reputation and drives your visitors away. And they can happen all together or just any combination of them.   What can you do? It turns out that you can do quite a lot of things: don’t user the default admin account  (WordPress: admin) set a hard to guess password keep your blog and its extensions/plugins up to date don’t install…