I have had two WordPress blogs hacked into in the past. That was at a time when I was doing very little internet marketing, and until I found time to address the situation (months later), these sites were penalised in the search engines. They were not removed, but the rankings were reduced.
Backing up your blog also helps in procuring from fix malware problem hackers. You must keep a copy of your files hide away in backup system so you can be confident of your database. This makes you a protected backup files that serves you in times of down that is unexpected is the machine. Hackers are not as likely to steal from a secured back up system.
Use strong passwords - Do what you can to use a strong password, alpha-numeric. Easy to remember passwords are also easy to guess!
Exploit Scanner goes seeking anything suspicious through the files on your site comment database and post tables. It notifies you for odd plugin names. It does not remove anything, it warns you for potential threats.
Install the WordPress Firewall Plugin. This plugin investigates web requests with WordPress-specific heuristics that are easy to recognize and prevent attacks that are most obvious.
There is another problem you have with WordPress. People always know where they can login and they also could just drop by your login form and try a different combination of user accounts and passwords out. In order to stop this from happening you want to set up Login Lockdown. It's a plugin that only allows users to attempt and login with a wrong password three Click This Link times. After that the IP address will be banned from the server for a certain timeframe.