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We know that you’ve invested lots of money and time into your website, so you might be ensuring about your website security. But it does not fit for all website because NO website is perfectly safe from being hacked. These days lack of website security is a serious and big concern and not even all big websites are safe. Some of website security breaks are not to steal your data or spoil your website, but use your server as an email relay for spam as well as to setup a temporary web server, usually to serve files of an illegal nature.
In general cases people worry when they see:
- Website Look Different
- Website Is Redirecting Somewhere Else,
- Alert in Google webmaster console like “This site may harm your computer”.
But, the big question here is “How Hackers and Spammers Get in or Hack Your Website”. Well! The three commons ways are through:
- Access Control
It doesn’t refer to how you log into your site like WordPress, Dreamweaver, Joomla!, but also refers to other areas like Hosting panel, Server (FTP, SFTP, SSH), Your computer, Your social media networks, etc. Access control is like the person that locks front door but leaves windows unlocked and the alarm system turned off. Keep in mind that exploitation of access control comes in the form of a brute force attack, in which the hackers and spammers attempt to guess the possible username and password to log in as the user.
- Software Vulnerabilities
About 95% of website owners are not able to address today’s software vulnerabilities because we cannot do anything with them but use as they are designed. For example- Web Servers, Infrastructure, Your Browser, etc. Exploitation of a software vulnerability is got through a POST Headers and a cleverly malformed Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
With POST Headers and URL methods, a hacker can run many attacks like Remote Code Execution (RCE), SQL Injection (SQLi) attacks and Remote / Local File Inclusion (R/LFI). Therefore, if a hacker can get into your software, then that person can probe your SQL database for vulnerabilities, make changes to your website and install malicious HTML code.
- Third-Party Services
These days, third-party integrations/services are more and more becoming a problem and widely-used in CMSs like Joomla! Drupal and WordPress. The problem with the exploitation of third-party integrations/services is that they’re beyond a site owner’s control and you usually assume that they’re safe.
How to Protect Your Website
With websites growing increasingly complex, and with more and more people using the web than ever, so it’s extremely important to know how to protect yourself from online hackers and spammers. Here are some tips we tend to provide every website owner that will listen when it comes to protecting website security.
- Use A Strong Password and Don’t Let Your Browser Remember It
- Keep Software & Everything Up to Date
- Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)
- Don’t Show Up Your Admin Pages
- Scan Your Website Regularly
Cyber-terrorists are always coming up with intelligent ways of hacking password-protected accounts. By using a strong password, you can protect yourself. Maybe you are thinking that the more complex the password the better, but length trumps complexity. Use words that have no obvious association with your website. You can use a combination of random words, symbols, and numbers in your passwords.
Have in mind that when website security holes are found in software, online hackers are fast to attempt to abuse them. So, ensure that all your software up to date and keep your site secure. If you are using third-party software, then make sure you apply security patches.
HTTPS is a secure communications protocol that transfers sensitive information between a web server and a web site. So, moving a website to this protocol means adding a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or an encryption Transport Layer Security (TLS) to your HTTP making sure additional security from hackers for both your website and your users’ data. So, HTTPS is essential for all online transactions, and adding a secure protocol layer guarantee security as well as HTTPs small search ranking engine factors, so you will be having some SEO advantages.
Hide your admin pages in search engines by adding the URLs to your robots.txt file, which will prevent them from showing in the search results. But, make sure that there are no other links pointing to those URLs. To block a page from showing in the search results, use a robots meta tag set on “noindex” because this way it will hide that page in the search results when Google finds the page and sees the noindex tag.
Website scanning will help you in protecting your site from attack from malicious elements and help you identify Website Errors and Outdated Codes which are affecting your website. If your website has infected with malware, then scan it right away. Scan your website at least once a month to ensure that everything is in tip top shape.