(Newswire.net — May 12, 2018) — When maintaining your website, you should never forget about your website’s security. It’s crucial that you protect your website from hackers, spammers and security breaches. If you have a small business website, you may not think it’s likely that your website will be targeted by a hacker, but the truth is that every website on the internet is at risk. Websites are compromised all the time, for various reasons. These agendas include stealing your data, spam comments, using your site to serve illegal files, using your website’s server as part of a botnet, and the list goes on and on. Hackers scour the internet with automated scripts and your website is at risk of being exploited or compromised if it’s not secure. You’ve likely already been educated on common security measures to implement, such as installing a firewall and being weary of uploading images that contain a virus. However, here are some other tips to keep your website safe:
1. Hire a Risk Management Company
It’s smart to hire a risk management service provider, for several reasons. For example, a risk management company can help you mitigate the involvement of third parties. You may be required to give third parties access to your website and your sensitive data for business reasons. Substantial risks arise when you give a third party access to your website, without a risk management company’s services in place. Due diligence and screening of third parties will be performed by them, in addition to monitoring and implementing security measures.
2. Use a Reliable Hosting Service
The initial skepticism over the new technology of cloud hosting is a thing of the past. You might still be wondering, is cloud hosting safe? The answer is yes, because the cloud technology has matured improved levels of security. With traditional hosting, your website’s files are stored in a specified physical server location. With cloud hosting, your site’s files are distributed and take up multiple virtual server locations that are associated with physical servers. With cloud hosting, you have an additional layer of security that protects the virtual network. Security protocols must still be implemented, though, to ensure you have a secure cloud server.
3. Moderate Your Website’s Comments
If you have a WordPress blog, for example, you should have it set up so that all comments on blog posts must be approved by you (the moderator) before going live on your website. The reason for this is because if your website automatically approves and posts all comments without validation, a hacker can easily post comments on your website that containing compromising script tags and active JavaScript. For example, they could post a comment that contains Cross-site scripting and has the power to steal information from users who view the comment, steal their login cookie, change your page content, etc. If you moderate comments for approval, you’ll like catch thousands of spam and hacker comments per month that would have compromised your website’s security.
4. Implement a Content Security Policy (CSP)
A fantastic tool you can use to defend your website against security breaches is a Content Security Policy (CSP). Your server will run the CSP to tell your browser to limit which JavaScript is allowed on your page, and disallowing the running of any scripts not hosted on your own domain. With this type of Content Security Policy implemented, an attacker or hacker’s scripts won’t work on your page.
5. Keep Your Software Up-To-Date
Your website’s security relies on up-to-date software. Your server’s operating system should be up-to-date, as well as any software you may be running on your website such as a CMS. With a CMS, such as WordPress, for example, security updates and system updates will be e-mailed to you or brought to your attention when you log in. You should not ignore those e-mails and notifications. If a hacker comes across a website with compromised software, they’ll be quick to abuse that weakness of security. If you aren’t running the latest version of WordPress that means you’re running an older version with known vulnerabilities and bugs that give hackers amo. There are various tools you can download to be kept up-to-date with notifications of updates, issues and vulnerabilities in your software. Always keep up with WordPress updates (including plugins and widgets) and update all of these things when notified.
6. Use Strong Passwords and Change Them Often
Even though they’re more annoying to type out when you log in, it’s crucial that you use a strong password with an abstract mix of numbers and letters, over 8 characters long. You should also change your password every 3 months as an added security precaution. You can also use salted passwords. A salt is random data that is used as an additional input that “hashes” a password. A new salt is randomly generated for each password. Salted passwords make a hacker’s job a lot harder and a lot less plausible to pull off, because every guess on your password has to be hashed separately.