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Who would have thought that the protectors of the secrets of some of the world's most powerful people would be so dumb or lazy?

Isn't it reasonable to expect that if you are looking after the secrets of some of the world's most powerful people ... secrets that, if revealed, might lead to those people becoming a lot less powerful ... you would actually take some serious steps to protect them?

You would expect that security around those secrets might be a whole lot tighter than what you might find on your average porn site ... wouldn't you?

Well, it seems that the company at the heart of the Panama Papers scandal could learn a thing or two about security from your average adult webmaster because getting into Mossack Fonseca's website ... which just happened to be run on WordPress ... could have been as running a simple Chrome extension over the website to see what plugins were being used.

If the hacker did that and found that Revolution Slider was on the site ... and it often is there on WordPress sites whether it is being used or not ... all he then had to do was type something like this mossfon.com/wp-content/plugins/revslider/release_log.txt and he would very quickly know whether this was going to be an easy hack or not.

If this is what the hacker tried, then he would have found that this keeper of important people's secrets was ... and as I write this, still is ... running a VERY out-of-date version of Revolution Slider and getting in was going to be child's play.

And just to make matters even worse, the keeper of all those important secrets had everything on the one server and none of it was hidden behind a firewall.

Now you and I may not bother with hiding our websites behind firewalls but this was a company that was protecting the secrets of people who rule the world and they didn't think that it was necessary to use a fire wall?

They certainly do use one now. Their website files disappeared behind a firewall soon after the hack was revealed but of course that was too late. The secrets were taken and now very important people are ducking for cover and hoping that the next time the phone rings it's not the IRS or tax department.

You're not that slack when it comes to the security of your websites are you? You're not using outdated versions of any WordPress plugin are you? I know that it's easy to miss updates for some plugins because they come bundled with themes and you don't always get a notification that a bundled plugin has been updated but you do check don't you?

On a totally different subject ... who would have thought that I would spend all of this week at home, sick as a dog?

I certainly wasn't expecting it. Last Friday I was looking at a diary that was empty of appointments but full of time blocked out for work that had to be done. Perhaps I should have realised that something was about to go wrong when there were no appointments for this week but I was just happy that I would be able to get a lot of stuff done.

Sadly, about the only thing I have been able to produce for the last six days has been a lot of green gunk ... and that's not something that I can turn into cash in the bank. I haven't even been able to say much either because, by 10am each day, my voice has disappeared almost entirely.

Fortunately, I am feeling a little better today and my voice has lasted beyond 10am, so there's hope that I'll be back at work on Monday but how would you cope if you couldn't work for a few days or more?

Do you have any contingency plans in place to cover for those times when you are too sick to work? Do you have submission agreements in place with TGPs that require you to submit something every day or you lose the right to submit to them? If you do, then how are you going to submit anything when you're not well enough to do any gallery building?

Times when you are too sick to work are inevitable. Those times are even more inevitable if you are not taking the time to look after yourself. So what are you doing to cover for those times when ill health catches up to you?

You can't block out times in your diary for ill health ... you can't plan in advance with any certainty for times like that. You can't say that it will never happen to you because it will.

So what are you doing now to cover for those times in the weeks or months ahead when you will just have to take time off because you're too sick to work?