IT Support Q&A

Are you sure it was automatic or client error ? If automatic how do others safeguard from this from happening? Many things break and issues occur when upgrading operating systems, particularly if your business is dependent on older more specialised Windows software.

Greetings Peter from rural Australia,

We often don't know the value of security until the horses have bolted.

I now use, and would never again not use, a website security service to keep my website secure and hacker free.

On Christmas morning, 2015, I received a stomach crunching email from my host company to say my website had been severely hacked. And their server used to transmit illegal emails.

Because of this threat, my host company shut my website down until I made my site more secure.

Nothing we did worked. From Christmas morning until mid January, my site came under a full scale attack from all over the world.

Again, my site was shut down by my host company until I could prove it was no longer vulnerable to attack.

This site is our only source of revenue. So this was a major event for us.

One of my problems is my website is based on the Wordpress platform. Which is the weakest as far as security is concerned. But for those of us who aren't technical wizards, it's the easiest platform to use.

In desperation, we looked online and found an Australian company that would harden our site. Back it up. And monitor it 24/7/365 against any further threats.

For this we pay a very reasonable monthly fee.

We've used them since mid January 2016. And it really is P.A.L. Peace. At Last. There are no more stomach crunching emails about attacks. I no longer worry about malware on my site. About being hacked. Or about my site being taken off the web.

I no longer even look at the logs. They're too scary. The number of brute force attempts - that they thwart - that are made daily on my site makes me blanch.

As more and more people use the Wordpress platform. And as more and more articles are written about how it's hackers' paradise. Tens of thousands of sites are destroyed every year. It should become easier and easier to sell a website security service.

Best wishes,

~Carol Jones, Ironing Diva❦

Purveyor of The Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover And Other Goodies

350,000 customers. In 29 countries.

There are several ways you can look into going about this:

• You will need Adobe Acrobat Pro (I believe) to have this ability within the "Tools" section. There will even be an option at the end of the form you can add a button that sends completed forms to your email address.
• You can create interactive documents in Microsoft Word as well. I've used these successfully when deploying them as surveys. However, if you export an interactive Word document to PDF, I am not sure if it will keep the interactive parts or not. Sorry, I haven't tried that functionality.
• You could add a link to an interactive Google Form document for them to fill out as they are going through the material (this could also be submitted to you and used as a lead capture if you get their names and emails - if you aren't capturing them elsewhere)

I really think a good answer to this kind of question requires a "wish list" of the features/processes you would like in an ideal system. Otherwise, all you're likely to get are lots of different opinions from people about systems they like, that may be perfect for their situations, but not so for yours.

And then, if there are none out there that people can recommend, or any that meet all your requirements, you can talk to someone like me to help put something together that will meet every single one of your specific needs.