Got an email from my hosting company about security.... [View all]

[steve2470]

I'll reproduce it below and omit the name of the company:

Over the past few weeks we have seen a rise in email abuse across our server farm. The majority of this abuse is attributed to weak and insecure passwords on client’s cPanel and email accounts. The other small portion of the email abuse comes from accounts that have been exploited thru old and outdated 3rd party scripts such as WordPress and Joomla.

As you are aware your website is part of the Global Internet Community. With this come’s great responsibilities and duties that every web site administrator must follow. It is crucial that you maintain strong passwords and that you rotate your passwords for both your cPanel and email user accounts. We suggest this is done at least every six months. Use passwords with at least 8 characters, both upper and lower case and a few special characters.

It also very important that you maintain your site files. Simply because you correctly installed WordPress two months ago does not mean that it is secure today. Third party scripts, including plugins and software must be updated and maintained on a regular basis. It is critical for us all to maintain our sites, this will allow us all to host on safe and secure servers.

Is this sort of email pretty common these days ? It's the first one I've ever gotten from them in 8 years. Thanks.

Steve