The threat landscape of cyber attacks are increasing every day as the integration of our daily lives with the Internet becomes more and more pronounced. However, as maybe a business owner or an active blogger, the costs of not having a website is too much to ignore. Hacking attempts have become common enough, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t protect your website, the customers and their data in the best way possible. To scan your site remotely for the security issues, you can use Astra’s website security scanner
According to recent data from a Verizon study on data breaches, more than 40% of attacks happen to small companies with flawed protection and mismanaged security analysis. So, when building a barricade, you have to know that you’re protecting your website from MySQL injections, automated bots, malware, brute force DDos attacks that compromise your customer’s data privacy.
What can you do to make sure your website remains safe and secure?
Here’s a couple of things you can look out for to ensure that your website is not thrown back by cyber attacks instead of tending to your clients’ needs:
- Stay wary against DDos (Denial of service) attacks
It’s not always a single system or a single hacker that tries to pummel your defenses to the ground – often, hackers utilize a group of ‘zombies’ to attack the website together with multiple requests, thus confusing and overwhelming the servers.
A single DDoS attack can pushe a website go offline, making it easier to misuse vulnerabilities (or even create some loopholes) so that hackers can step in and manipulate the code to their needs. Also, if customers try to access your site and the servers are down, it creates a bad reputation and untrustworthiness.
Here, you need to ensure your hosting service or provider is well-equipped to deal with such a barrage of fake requests. Better the quality of the host system, more the expectation of regular maintenance and periodic penetration tests for round-the-clock monitoring of the situation. Good shielding can protect against dire attacks such as SYN flood, DNS query flood, or User Datagram Protocol (UTP) reflection attacks, to name a few.
- XSS (Cross-Site Scripting)
XSS allows hackers to compromise website integrity by inserting malicious code into the unassuming parts of the website, from where they establish roots onto customers’ computers as they access the site to manipulate and misuse their data.
- SQL injections
As mentioned before, watch out for this form of attack since it targets the fact that most web server databases are hosted by SQL. Hackers then insert their own version of the SQL code in order to get to the sensitive information. The worst part is that it is very difficult to identify any significant differences between normal SQL code and illegitimate requests for modification.
- Aim for SSL certification
The next time you visit a website, look out for the lock symbol next to the URL or the ‘https’ phrase. Ensure that your website possesses SSL certification as this benefits you in many ways – it ranks better on Google, motivates your customers to open your site without fearing the multiple pop-ups or security risks. SSL certification also makes sure that data going both ways is encrypted so as to prevent any possible leaks of sensitive information like credit cards, login details, etc.
- Always be prepared with a back-up
Of course, preparing a back-up of your website and saving it in a secure offline location like a USB or a hard drive isn’t exactly important but you’ll be grateful for it in the long run in case of any potential hacking attempts or crashes. There’s no need for a manual back-up, either – you can always inquire for the services of a good quality website to do it for you.
- Check out HTTP/2
It’s a second version, faster, and more secure – and yet, a lot of websites still use the outdated ‘https’ version, probably due to web hosting companies not offering the same. HTTP/2 allows for the flow of data from both sides, in contrast to the previous version, and a lesser amount of time is taken for interactions between client and the server. It also boasts of multiple lanes for data flow in a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection, making the entire process faster.
- Manage your payments portal / gateway
Utilize a reliable and trustworthy online payments platform, like PayPal. This is important since the processing of credit and debit cards, payment information, and other web payments must be done with maximum security.
You can conduct penetration testing of your website to know the loopholes tha can lead to hack.
There are many more pointers to keep in mind while conducting a website security check, but keep these few important ones in mind. Evolution is key – as new challenges arise, so should our ability to protect ourselves from the bad while utilizing the good.
