Meet Your Own Worst Nightmare

If you don’t do security updates, this is what will happen to your website, which you just put all the effort into creating:

Your website will get eaten by a monster. You may come to your computer someday, and the site is gone, or someone else might come to your website and see something like this:

Not convinced of the importance? Well, pretend that your site (or one you developed for someone else) simply vanishes; that is, it’s gone. All the files, corrupted. Now, you are faced with a problem. Start all over again from scratch?

Or consider that you might end up seeing a screen like this one, taken from a real site that was hacked (because of security issues with the content management system, in this case, Joomla). I didn’t see this screen; a friend whom I’d made a site for discovered it, called me up, and asked what to do.

“It will never happen to me.” Well, consider if you are doing a site for someone else, and the fact that you didn’t follow proper security procedures results in loss of data or a breach in customer privacy.

Okay, maybe you won’t get taken off to jail, but a breach in security doesn’t necessarily only affect you, and it can be serious. So wouldn’t it be worth learning how to protect against it?