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Late last night, a young agency owner published a YouTube video walking his client through his weekly status update.
In that public video, he was sharing on screen what access he had and still needed– not realizing that he was publishing the client’s various admin credentials for the world to see.
This includes admin to the website, Google Ads, and so forth.
There are millions of bots trawling the web looking for this information.
And once they get access, all kinds of havoc happen– credit card spending, ransom notes, and spam posts.
Especially troublesome is the backdoor malware that is hard to find and uninstall.
In our site audits, we uncover backdoor spam about 20% of the time– largely because of WordPress plugins that are out of date or not being supported anymore.
Back to the story of this agency owner— he got locked out and wasn’t able to get back in.
Fortunately, it was one of our guys who rescued it– using the very credentials he published for the entire internet to see.
Think about how many plugins you have on your site, how many systems your business is using, how many pixels are passing data, and how many people are involved.
It’s normal to be onboarding and removing people who are working on your business, each of them with varying levels of access.
Are you firmly in control of this?
If you have your Access Checklist locked down, you’ll never have to worry about being exposed.
This is the first of 10 components within Digital Plumbing.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.