Few Important Steps to Defend Your Website by Jennifer Scott

Few Important Steps to Defend Your Website

Whether you’re a business owner, a blogger or any kind of website administer, there’s no bigger fear than a hacker logging into your website, taking over control and taking all your information. This will only make matters worse if your website holds personal information from your customers or clients. Worst still, it could contain your personal information. Despite websites being the leading source of information around the world, it’s surprising how much information hackers can get from simply hacking your password and accessing the deeper parts of your servers.

To help protect you from ever having to experience this misfortune, here are a couple of steps and tips to help you boost the safety and security levels of your website, protecting it from potential hackers.

Keep Everything Up to Date

No matter what hosting service or blogging platform you’re using, always make sure that you update your site as soon as you possibly can. With most service updates, they’ll be a range of security features built-in that are designed to protect your website. As long as a platform exists, hackers will be trying out new and innovative ways to try and access these servers. They may even succeed on a couple of sites. Once the operators have been notified, they’ll patch things up and will consequently release an update.

Use Site Protection Software

Whether you’re hosting an HTML server or a WordPress blog, utilise plugins that are available to you. Regarding WordPress, there are a tonne of free security plugins that are reputable and trustworthy that you can download today. Alternatively, if you’re running an HTML website, look for third party security plugins, such as SiteLock. SiteLock is renowned for being one of the most up-to-date security services and is used by hundreds of millions of websites across the internet.

Update Your Password

Having an easy to guess password is just asking to get hacked. Try to avoid family names, birthdays or pet names. Certainly, don’t use endings such as ‘abcdef’ or ‘123’. Hacker software will figure this out in an instant. If a hacker is specifically targeting your website, chances are they can simply look at your Facebook page to get the information they need to access your website.

Sarah Parkhill, the Website Administer for Best Australian Writers, continues;

“Despite all the security warnings and tips giving to people using the internet, the most common password is still ‘123456’. Hackers, or their software, will genuinely find this out in less than a second. When protecting your website with a password, using something extremely complicated that you can write down and hide physically or will learn over time. Something like ‘Aubuf&8fh3*f’ is ideal. Alternatively, you can use a random password generator to create something near impossible to figure out.”

Be Aware of Your User Permissions

If you have user accounts on your website where users can create accounts and upload files to your servers, be very careful of how your website is set up to deal with these uploaded files. Without special care and attention, even if a hacker is uploading a photo for their profile picture, they can very easily include a script inside the file that will execute once it has been uploaded to your servers. Even a simple script can grant them access to your servers where they will be able to break down firewalls and open up ports to allow more scripts in to cause damage and potential to steal your data.

The best way of approaching this is to deny any kind of file execution from your users. The method of doing this depends solely on your servers, but your website hosting company should be able to advise you.

About the author:

Jennifer is the business developer that works in different areas of education, technology, security and various types of online marketing. Prior to business developing Jennifer was consultant at Deloitte, and managed security services provider and developer of a wide range of security solutions