Cyber attacks are happening all the time, so website owners need to do more to keep their sites safe from hackers. Website security is all about using technical measures and best practices to stop people from getting in without permission, stealing data, and doing other kinds of cyber attacks.
It’s important to have good website security to protect user information, keep your brand’s reputation, and avoid major security breaches.
So, in this article, we’ll look at some ways you can make your website a safe place for people to go on the Internet.
Why website security is important
Reliability is an important part of managing a website that can’t be overlooked. As we use the Internet more in our daily lives, online threats like hacking, malware, and phishing attacks keep getting worse.
Before anything goes wrong, you should know how important website security is and what steps you can take to protect your online presence.
Why is it a good idea to spend money on site security?
- Protecting sensitive information is one of the most important reasons to put money into a website’s reliability. Websites that collect personal and financial information are a target for hackers and cybercriminals. In 2020, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center got more than 791,000 reports of possible Internet crimes that caused more than $4.2 billion in losses. A security breach can hurt your business’s reputation, cause you to lose customers, get you sued, and cost you a lot of money in fines.
- Another reason to make sure your website is safe is to keep your customers’ trust. Customers are more likely to trust a website that uses encryption and authentication protocols. 68% of customers are willing to spend more money with a company they trust, according to a 2020 study by Accenture.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) also depends on how safe a website is. Google cares a lot about how safe websites are. Google’s algorithms like sites that have SSL/TLS certificates, which encrypt data and make communication between the site and the user more reliable.
Google said that its Chrome browser would show a “Not Secure” message on over 80% of all websites that don’t have SSL/TLS certificates by 2020.
A Look at How Cyber Attacks Are Going Right Now
The state of cyber attacks right now is complicated and always changing. Cybercrime has become a global business, and hackers are using more and more advanced techniques to attack people, businesses, and governments.
The problem got worse because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Attackers took advantage of the fact that more and more people are working from home and spending more time online:
- The rise of ransomware attacks is one of the most important changes in the past few years. Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the data of its victim, making it impossible to access until a ransom is paid. Ransomware attacks are happening more often and are getting worse. In 2021, attacks on Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and Kaseya made headlines.
- Another bad trend is taking advantage of weaknesses in the supply chain. Attackers go after third-party software or service providers to get into the systems of their clients. For example, the SolarWinds attack of 2020, which is thought to have been run by hackers working for the Russian government, broke into the networks of several U.S. government agencies and many private companies.
- Attacks that use social engineering, like phishing and spear-phishing, are also still common. Users are tricked into giving away sensitive information or downloading malware through these attacks. As more people work from home, attackers are focusing more on using social engineering to take advantage of people’s weaknesses.
- Large businesses may find it harder to keep their customers’ information safe. But Aliexpress, a huge online store with 8.8 million customers a day, handles data protection perfectly and is a reliable platform. And third-party services that help sellers on this marketplace do their jobs can’t get private information about users from the site.
But the threat landscape is not just made up of big attacks. Also at risk are small and medium-sized businesses. They are easy targets for cybercriminals.
Verizon found that 36% of data breaches in 2021 were caused by small businesses.
Check how vulnerable your website is.
Hackers are always looking for ways to break into websites. Doing a website security audit is one of the most important things you can do to protect your website and the data of your users from possible attacks.
Performing a security check on a website
A website security audit is one of the most important things you can do to keep your website safe from cyber threats. The audit involves a thorough look at your website’s infrastructure, applications, and access controls to find holes that hackers could use.
Let’s look at the steps you need to take to do a website reliability audit and give you some tips along the way:
- Use automated tools to check for holes. Nessus, OpenVAS, and Qualys are all tools that can be used for this. These tools will check your website for old software versions or servers that aren’t set up right and give you a report of any problems they find.
- Check the controls for user access. This means checking to make sure that user permissions and password policies are in line with best practices. For example, all user accounts should have unique, strong passwords, and administrative accounts should have extra steps, like two-factor authentication.
- Look over the code. This means looking at the code for weaknesses like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Code reviews can be done by hand or with tools like CodeSonar, Veracode, or Checkmarx that do it automatically.
- Sort vulnerabilities by how bad they are. Once vulnerabilities have been found, it’s important to rank them based on how bad they are and how likely they are to be used. High-risk holes should be fixed as soon as possible.
- If you do payment transactions on your website, we would also suggest that you use payment consulting. This will make users feel safer.
Taking care of any problems found by the audit
A recent report from IBM says that a data breach costs an average of $3.86 million. That’s a big amount of money that could have been saved if the website’s reliability had been checked regularly. By finding and fixing vulnerabilities before a security breach happens, you can protect your website and the data of your users.
Some ways to security holes are:
- Changing the software;
- Setting up servers;
- Rewriting code for an application;
- Redesigning controls for user access;
- Adding more security measures, like firewalls or systems that look for intrusions.
Update your software and systems.
It’s important to keep your website’s software and systems up to date if you want to keep it safe. Hackers are always looking for ways to take advantage of weaknesses in old software and systems, and failing to keep them up to date can have terrible effects.
How important it is to update software often
Keeping your software up-to-date is a must if you want your site to be reliable.
Updates usually come with security patches that fix bugs that the software’s developers or security researchers have found.
One of the main reasons for data breaches is that software isn’t updated often enough. To avoid becoming a victim of a cyber attack, it’s important to keep up with software updates.
Updating your systems and servers is important.
Systems and servers should also be kept up to date to avoid problems, just like software. Hackers often go after outdated server and operating systems because they know they have flaws that can be used against them.
Along with keeping your systems and servers up to date, it’s important to check your configurations often to make sure they are set up correctly. This means turning off services, ports, and protocols that aren’t needed and setting up firewalls and intrusion detection systems to protect against known attack methods.
Making sure that your third-party plugins and applications are safe. If they are not properly protected, third-party apps and plugins can pose a major security risk. These apps often have access to sensitive information and can make your website less secure.
So, it’s important to make sure that any third-party apps or plugins you use on your website are always up-to-date and that any known security flaws are fixed quickly.
Also, IoT devices’ security leaves a lot to be desired and is often ignored. Allowing IoT devices to work without pairing with your resource can have a big effect on IoT pricing. But it’s well worth the money.
Set up strong password rules.
Passwords are more important than ever in the digital age to protect our online accounts and sensitive information. We still see people pick weak passwords that are easy to figure out, which leaves their accounts open to hacking attempts.
To make sure you are safe online, you should set up strong password policies.
Why strong passwords are important
Strong passwords are hard to guess, long, and different from other passwords. A strong password has a mix of capital and small letters, numbers, and special characters.
The harder it is to figure out a password, the longer it is. Having a different password for each account makes sure that a single hacked password won’t lead to a chain reaction of accounts being hacked.
Hackers often use brute-force attacks, in which they use software to make millions of possible password combinations until they find the right one. With strong passwords, it takes a brute-force attack a lot longer to work, which makes it less likely that someone will be able to hack into your account.
Using a difficult password is just as important as using a reverse phone number lookup to stop calls from unknown numbers.
Having users follow rules about passwords
Users need to follow rules about passwords if online security is to be kept up. Policies about passwords should include things like a minimum length, the use of special characters, and changing the password often. Users can also use password managers to make strong passwords and store them in a safe way.
It’s also important to tell people not to use the same password for more than one account. If a single password is broken into, it makes it more likely that multiple accounts will also be broken into.
If your site involves money transfers to other countries or the ability to buy BNB in Canada, security should be your number one concern. Passwords for user accounts are a big part of making this happen.
Using two-factor authentication more often
Two-factor authentication (2FA) makes online accounts even safer by adding an extra layer of security. With 2FA, users need to give two pieces of information to log in.
Even if a hacker gets a hold of a user’s password, they still need access to their mobile device or some other way to verify their identity.
Regular Backups
Imagine you wake up one day to find that your website has been hacked and all your data has been lost. It’s every website owner’s worst nightmare, but it happens quite often. That’s why you need backups. In these kinds of situations, they can save lives.
How important backups are
Backups are copies of your website and its information that are made at regular times. If your website gets hacked, having backups means you can quickly get it back to the way it was.
Backups also protect you from things like losing data by accident or having hardware fail.
How often should your website be backed up?
How often you back up your website depends on how often the information on your website changes. If you update your blog every day, you should back up your site every day.
If your website doesn’t change often and has mostly static content, weekly or monthly backups may be enough.
Before making big changes to your site, like updating plugins or themes, it’s also important to make a backup. This makes sure that if something goes wrong, you can quickly go back to the previous version.
Keeping backups in a safe place
It’s not enough to just have back-ups. You also need to make sure they are kept in a safe place.
Backups should be kept away from your website’s server, in a different place. This protects you in case your server goes down and you lose both your website and its backups.
Train your staff
Employees are often the weakest link when it comes to a site’s reliability. If just one of your employees clicks on a bad link or downloads a file with a virus, the security of your whole website can be broken.
So, teach your employees not only how to use scraper API, enterprise automation solutions, and accounting programs, but also how to use different advanced website security practices.
Teaching employees the best ways to keep a website secure
Your workers should know how to spot and avoid:
- Typical phishing schemes;
- Suspicious emails;
- Websites that look fishy.
Also, employees should know the risks of downloading files or software from places they don’t know or trust. There should be clear rules about downloading and installing software at the company.
Also, it would be a good idea to get rid of spyware, even if your employees use Apple hardware, which is often thought to be harder for hackers to break into. There are ways to stop this kind of software, which is called “malicious software.”
holding training sessions on a regular basis
It is important to hold regular training sessions on site reliability. At least once a year, employees should go through training to make sure they know about the most recent threats.
The training sessions should also cover any changes to the company’s security policies and procedures, such as changes to password requirements or software updates.
Getting employees to report any strange behavior
Security breaches can be stopped by telling employees to report anything that seems odd. Employees should know how to report problems to the company and who to talk to if they have security concerns.
Reporting suspicious behavior can help companies find potential threats and deal with them before they become bigger problems.
Use plug-ins and tools for security
There are many security plugins and tools you can use to keep your website safe. You can use these tools to protect your website against malware, hacking attempts, and brute-force attacks, among other things.
Here are some of the most popular plugins and tools for security:
- Wordfence. Wordfence is a popular security plugin for WordPress sites that offers firewall protection, malware scanning, and real-time threat monitoring;
- Sucuri. Sucuri is a web security company that offers a suite of security tools for websites, such as a website firewall, malware scanning, and DDoS protection;
- Acunetix. Acunetix is a website vulnerability scanner that can help you find and fix possible security holes in your website;
- Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a company that makes websites faster and safer. It offers a set of security tools, such as a website firewall, DDoS protection, and SSL encryption.
Conclusion
In the digital age we live in now, website security is very important. Cyber attacks are getting more complicated and more common, so you need to take steps to protect your website.
By using the above strategies, website owners can make sure that their website and its users are safe and secure.