What most webmasters and hosting customers do not understand is that no website is ever 100% secure. And while there are dangers seemingly lurking at every corner, there are also many ways to minimize the risk of being a victim.
Choose a Secure Web Hosting Solution
One of the most effective ways to ensure the security of your website is to purchase service from a reliable hosting company. If the provider’s servers are compromised, then so is your website. Therefore, you need to keep your eyes peeled for a specific set of security features that protect your site against the arsenal of roaming threats. Some to look out for include:
- Anti-virus protection
- Spam filtering
- SSH (Secure Sockets Layer)
- Firewalls
- Intrusion detection
- DDoS protection
Get Your Coding Together
If your site utilizes scripts that process global variables such as POST and GET data forms or predefined variables like HTTP_USER_AGENT or HTTP_REFERER, you are at the risk of being compromised via exploits that inject malicious codes through these variables. Validation methods are only as secure or insecure as you make them. However, even if you apply secure validation of any server-side programming language to incoming data, the parser can still be exploited by a low-level language or binary code. To reduce the probability of such instances, take the following factors in mind when coding your site:
- Only use clean, well supported commercial or open-source technologies for server-side scripting
- Stay current with all the industry recommended data validation functions and techniques
- Avoid the use of unnecessary global variables
- Never assume that your visitors will not try to submit malicious data to your site
- Assign unique login credentials to individual users when appropriate
- Organize your site into multiple directories and access levels
- Don’t provide users with no more access than they need
If Your Site is Compromised
The simple fact that your site can be accessed on the World Wide Web makes it vulnerable to security threats. If you only run a small website, there is a great chance that you will never cross paths with a hacker or anyone else looking to initiate your downfall. On the other hand, if your site is very popular, the chance of meeting up with cyber villains goes up considerably. For this reason, you should have an action plan in place, something you can rely on should your website security be breached. Doing so will allow you to respond quicker in the time of a crisis, take care of the exploited issues and ultimately reduce the likelihood of suffering the same ill fate.
Conclusion
The minute your site goes live on the web, it instantly becomes the target of hackers, malicious software writers, con artists and identity thieves. Knowing that powerful corporations have been compromised should give you all the motivation to take proactive measures with your website. This can be done by investing in a secure hosting solution, making use of the available security mechanisms and arming yourself with knowledge about the latest security threats.
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