Content management systems across the board, be it WordPress, Joomla or your own customized and hand-made CMS, are under threat. Massive password infiltrations are being reported throughout the world. Even a domain like Reddit was compromised and that gives you a fair bit of idea of the threat your CMS is under. Even as late as December 18 this year, a massive attack to breach security was reported, with hits going up to 14 million attacks in an hour!
Your own website or blog is not out of danger. You need to boost your CMS password in ways that can resist threats and attacks. To begin with, you need to work on your passwords. Keep separate passwords for your CMS, the domain hosting account, the emails and other online entities. Secondly, keep changing them ever so often. Each time, put forward a password that is long, with mixed alpha-numerics, and mixed cases, both upper and lower. This makes it somewhat difficult to crack.
Now, to fix hacked CMS installations, you need to check through the tutorial published by Google through its Webmaster Help blog. You can learn what you can about reversing a hack and fighting back. After you have gone through the steps outlined in this tutorial, you should clean your database to weed out users with higher permission levels. Sometimes, even after cleansing a CMS, you may ignore an admin level user access or FTP level access created by the hacker. Unless you block this as well, the hacking will happen again through this leak.
You can install and use a Chrome add-on called User Agent Switcher. This offers info to Google acting as a Googlebot. So, when hackers take over, Google will inform you instantly.
Make sure you are more vigilant during weekends and holidays. This is when hackers find the guard down and barge in!
Debajyoti Banerjee is the Founder, Director & CEO of 
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