I am the first to admit that I hadn’t been giving this site much love and attention when the hacking occurred. My virtual assistant business was super busy as were my kids with their after school activities. The excuses kept coming and I kept promising myself that I’d get to it tomorrow.

How The Hacking Was Discovered

Then I received a really irate email. I don’t know if she was a regular reader or just happened upon Working WAHM that day but she was all kinds of perturbed about the type of content I was publishing.

I found this curious because, honestly, I hadn’t published any content that recently. And as any of my clients and friends will attest, I am a stickler for high quality content (I even proofread my emails before hitting the “send” button!)

So imagine my surprise when I came here to Working WAHM to find the most god-awful articles and a strange subdirectory as my home page. Either the articles were spun a million times or someone who doesn’t know English very well wrote them. It read like the jibberish of a 2-year-old.

On The Hunt For Mysterious Posts

Now, I am not a real techie person. I know enough about the backend of WordPress to upload photos and change some colors in the stylesheet but trying to figure out how someone created a subdirectory for my site was beyond my expertise. And to make matters worse, when I looked at my post directory, NONE of these mystery posts appeared!

Honestly, I was about to just give up and shut the whole site down.

While my head was spinning, I noticed there were some comments that needed approval, so I went to the comments section. This was the key to discovering the mysterious posts because the unapproved comments were linked to the articles I never wrote. So I had to click on the article title in the comments section and was brought to a different post dashboard which contained ALL the mystery posts.

Let me tell you, there were HUNDREDS of these garbage posts! Thank goodness for the bulk delete function because it didn’t take long to delete them all but I was fuming because I certainly didn’t want to take the time to delete all these posts. I have better things to do with my time, you evil hackers!

Lessons Learned

• Keep your blog up to date. If I was logging in even twice a week I would have discovered the hacking much sooner.
• Change your password frequently. I don’t know how but these hackers are able to infiltrate passwords that aren’t original or that have been active for too long.
• Keep your users list up to date. Turns out the hackers were using one of my users’ logins to add these posts. Since she’s a contributor, I couldn’t just delete her user profile without messing up all her content, so I changed her password, too.
• Good manners mean the world. While I appreciated the reader’s email, I was also miffed at her because she was very accusatory and rude, almost accusing me of being a scam artist. She doesn’t know me from the proverbial hole-in-the-wall so it was highly insulting. We’re all adults here…if you don’t agree with something that was written on the web, inquire kindly or just ignore it.

Here’s to hoping you never get hacked!

Are you cut out for working from home? Not everyone is and that’s totally fine; but before you take the plunge and decide to quit your day job, we’ll be going through the thought process that every work at home entrepreneur or freelancer should perform in this week’s series of articles.

Today we’re examining your strengths and weaknesses. And one way to make this self-examination work is to be very honest with yourself when answering these questions. You certainly want to have confidence about your venture and I don’t want to be your dream killer but you need to be realistic or you run the risk of hitting a financial wall of ruin.

1. Are you self-motivated and able to get yourself organized to complete whatever tasks are necessary each day? When you’re working as your own boss from a home office, there’s no manager looking over your shoulder or noting how long you took for lunch.

The responsibility is yours alone and you alone will pay the consequences if deadlines are not met. This is true of any service provider who has client work to perform and is equally true of internet marketers who make their money producing or promoting products. This added responsibility is often enough motivation to get you going in the morning but sometimes an extra push is needed. Do you know who will give you that push?

2. What type of work can you do? What skills have your previous jobs given you that you can transfer to an online business? Each of your previous jobs have been learning experiences so figure out what you learned in each position.

Many work at home businesses tend to be internet businesses, which make any computer skills you have mighty important. But even if you’ve worked at restaurants your whole career, do you have enough food knowledge to start a food blog, write a cookbook, or start a catering business from your home?

3. What type of work do you enjoy? Enjoying your work and having a certain skill set are two completely different things. I graduated college with an advertising degree and in December of my senior year I realized I didn’t like anything about advertising! I still paid my dues working at an ad agency but was it enjoyable? No way!

This list of enjoyable tasks might be significantly different from your list of skills from above but that’s alright. Just keep in mind that pursuing that enjoyable work might take extra training but nothing is impossible.

4. What tasks do you despise? If talking to new people gives you sweaty palms, then being a member of a direct sales company might not be the right fit for you. Likewise, you might be the best salesperson around but if you hate doing your bookkeeping tasks, you’ll be an accountant’s worst nightmare come tax season.

If there’s something you really dislike doing, keep in mind that you’ll have to hire someone else to do the task.

5. How do you handle distractions? If your mom or best friend call you to chat on Tuesday morning, will you answer the phone? How many loads of laundry do you plan on doing while working? Will you still need to work when the kids get home from school?

Setting personal boundaries is an important strength for the work at home business owner because without boundaries, you’ll try to fit personal tasks in between your business tasks. While some people are good at multitasking this way, there are just as many who don’t multitask well and need more focus.

So…did you answer honestly? Is your brain pumping with ideas of how you can work from home? Keep that excitement up and stay tuned for the second installment of this series.