With the growing work-from-home situation, more websites and businesses are falling victim to malicious cyberattacks and online threats. Online hackers spare no business and often attack websites with security loopholes and vulnerabilities to access their critical data for malicious activities.
Having robust security measures in place to check websites for threats and protect your business security from online attacks is imperative. This article will discuss five common website threats and ways to overcome them for utmost website security and protection.
The State of Website Security
The number of cyberattacks that target websites has been rising for years now. However, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, cyber-attacks have risen sharply, to where governments worldwide have noted this.
Unfortunately, this sharp rise in cyber attacks also coincides with when we see more and more new websites than ever before. In addition, thanks to the various kinds of lockdowns worldwide, small businesses with an offline presence have begun to go online and are finding success in the digital marketplace.
So, as websites and attacks increase rapidly, it’s important to look at some of the most notorious cyber security problems and explore a few solutions for them.
5 Common Security Threats to Websites
- Malicious code injections
Code injections are the most common cyberattacks. A code injection attack is conducted by submitting malicious code (injecting) to the server through website input points.
For example, hackers could paste malicious code on the username field of your website. This can happen via any field from where the website accepts input from the user.
There are many types of injection attacks. SQL injection, script injection, and shell injection are more unpopular examples.
Preventing injection attacks is done in several ways. The first is to simply filter all the input that’s received by the server. WAFs (Web Application Firewalls), SQL LIMIT, and following the principle of least privilege are some ways. In addition, there are various applications that you can buy off the shelf to do this for you.
Another method to prevent injection attacks is using a safe API that quarantines different data types. So, website data will be kept separate from user queries and user-input data. This way, nothing that’s input via the user will get close to your website data.
- DDoS attacks
DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service, and it’s the type of cyber attack where hackers overwhelm your server with thousands upon thousands of requests. They sometimes use hundreds of devices to do this, so the attack is said to be distributed.
As requests flood your server, it tries to process each of them but cannot keep up and will eventually crash, bringing your website down with it. Successful DDoS attacks can cripple the server and are more common than you imagine.
To prevent DDoS attacks, you need specialized tools. These are applications that are equipped with huge databases of DDoS perpetrators. If there’s a request by known hackers, the requests are simply denied, and the devices are blocked.
Apart from that, DDoS prevention applications are also equipped to detect DDoS attacks and stop them at the source, making them quite effective. In addition, WAFs mentioned earlier can also help prevent DDoS attacks.
- Phishing
For all the talk about malware injections and DDoS attacks, humans — willingly or through ignorance — are the most common enablers of most cyber attacks.
As you’d imagine, bad passwords are one of the most important culprits, but it doesn’t end there. Phishing attacks, like all other cyber attacks, are on the rise.
A phishing attack is where hackers send a malicious email to your employees. Unfortunately, the email is opened on a business computer, and worse still, people sometimes enter sensitive data. All these are logged, and hackers have passwords and many of your business data.
The only real measure of solving this problem is education. Ensure that all your employees know how to identify emails that are phishing attacks. Also, enforce stricter password standards. Names coupled with birthdays can be hacked in a matter of seconds.
- Malware
There’s a good amount of public knowledge about malware. Unfortunately, it’s code that is built for nefarious purposes. It can be transferred to your server via phishing, injection, or fake websites.
There’s a variety of malware that hackers can use — worms, trojans, ransomware, and spyware are some of the better-known ones.
Preventing malware attacks needs a combination of human intelligence and specially designed software. As for human intelligence, it’s important not to visit shady websites, click on random emails that promise money and fortune, etc.
However, a lot of times, that simply isn’t enough. To prevent attacks that may happen via other means, it’s important to update all your firewalls and use anti-malware software. These applications can detect malware, remove them, and even notify you of the attacks.
- Brute force attacks
Brute force attacks are a type of cybersecurity attack where hackers use specially designed software to keep trying different combinations to crack your password. This software is so advanced that it can crack easy passwords within seconds.
There’s no real way to stop these attacks, unfortunately. We live in a world where you can easily access anything remotely if you have the right credentials. So, strong passwords are a must.
However, there are a few things that you can do. You can limit the number of times a user can attempt the login. You can also encrypt all data so that even if the attack is successful, the data is useless until you have a decryption key.
The Cost of Website Security
Hence, considering the increasing risks of cybersecurity and online threats, taking the utmost security precautions is highly important to protect your business data and credibility. A thorough and tested security measure and recovery plan can save your business time, money, and reputation.
So, make sure you use the piece above to implement the tips and combat malware, brute force, and DDoS attacks. At the same time, you can also get cloud-based website security applications, such as SiteLock Website Security which removes malicious codes and malware automatically from your site.
ResellerClub offers SiteLock Website Security plans for automatic scanning and malware removal to increase your business trust, reputation, and overall sales. So, get in touch with us to opt for a suitable and affordable SiteLock plan for your business and get free integration with your existing web hosting plan.
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