Being secure in the online world becomes increasingly important every day, and it is vital to safeguard your website and the data it holds now. Along with an affordable website design in Perth, security is a significant cause of concern. A recent study stated that there is an attack in every 39 seconds on an average on the web, and the unsafe usernames and passwords give attackers more chance of success.
Website security is a strategy used to maintain the safety of a website. A website’s safety includes protection from outside people who want to damage the website. They can use it for nefarious criminal things or prevent it from working.
It is essential because it protects your website and its data. Safety measures can come in many forms, including encrypting data, monitoring website visitors, and defending against external agents.
How can you tell if a website is secure?
A website is secure if it has not been broken into, cannot be broken into, and is monitored for abnormal activity. To see if a website is safe, run a website security check with a tool like SiteCheck. While not perfect, it is one level of defense against known malware and viruses.
Five common website security issues
Website security issues come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Here are the five most common ones.
1) Spam
Spam is often posted as comments on blogs, forums, and social media sites in the guise of a genuine contribution or opinion. You can easily spot comment spam because the content is entirely random or irrelevant to the topic. The posts are inserted into discussions for no reason other than promoting content on another site, company, or service.
Comment spam can affect your website in many ways:
- Weakens your brand
- It wastes your time moderating and deleting comments
- Damages your website’s SEO
- Sends your site visitors to dangerous or low-quality websites
2) Viruses and Malware
Malware means “malicious software”. It’s a type of code that can be injected into your website. And, with over 28,000,000 malware attacks blocked daily, it’s becoming more common. A malware attack can come in many different forms, including:
- Remote access trojan
- Bot
- Password utility
- Keylogger
- Web shell
- Privilege escalation
- Reverse shell
- Worm
- Phishing
These malware attacks can do horrible things to your website, including but not limited to:
- Disrupt hosting services
- Block website access
- Steal personal data
- Load dirty third-party scripts
- Redirect website visitors to random pages
3) WHOIS Domain Registration
A WHOIS attack attempts to obtain sensitive information from a domain’s WHOIS database. Domain registrars save your account information so you don’t have to remember it whenever you change your domain.
And although many website owners trust these websites, there are also dangers. If someone acquires your login data through hacking or other means, they could use this information to obtain your domain registration details and hijack your domain name.
4) DDoS Attacks
A denial of service or DDoS attack attempts to make a web server or the website unavailable by overwhelming it with increased traffic from multiple sources. The industry that suffers the most from DDoS attacks, by far, is the gaming industry, with a whopping 79% of all attacks being focused on them.
DDoS attacks can come in different forms, including, but not limited to:
- SYN Flood Attacks send more requests than your server can handle.
- UDP Flood Attacks send large amounts of data to the server.
- HTTP Get Request Attacks to overload the target website by requesting pages that are on the site.
- ICMP Flood Attacks send large amounts of ICMP requests.
- Brute Force Attacks makes an initiative to guess the username and password for a website’s phpMyAdmin interface.
5) Negative SEO (Search Engine Blacklists)
A search engine blacklist lists websites not indexed by any major search engines.
Some hackers can engage in “Black Hat SEO “or “negative SEO. “ By inserting malicious code into a competitor’s website, they can compromise the site’s security and push it onto Google’s blacklist. An affordable website design in Perth cannot save it from becoming blacklisted.
This can be accomplished in several methods:
- Web page spam
- Paid links spam
- Rich snippets spam
- Malware
- Phishing
The simple yet effective ways to keep your website safe and secure
- Use A SSL Certificate (HTTPS Protocol)
- Keep Your Website Software Up-To-Date
- Choose A Secure Web Hosting Plan
- Use Complicated Passwords
- Change Your Password Regularly
- Keep A Log Of All User Activity
- Assign User Permissions
- Backup Your Website Regularly
- Keep Your Web Server Software Up-To-Date
- Restrict File Uploads
- Mask Your Login Area
- Whitelist Specific IP Addresses For SFTP/SSH Access
- Install Firewalls
- Secure Your Personal Computer
- Purchase Domain Privacy Protection
By following these website security tips, you will protect your site and all of your clients who use your website!
If you need help improving your website security or want someone to manage your website entirely so you never have to think about this stuff again, let’s chat!