In this time of heightened cyber-attack you must be aware of how to secure website from hackers. Your website is an important asset to your business. It is very important to protect it from any kind of threat and hacking. Here are some ways that can help you protect your website from hacking.
1. Install security plugins
If your website is built using a content management system, you can easily improve the security of your website using the plugins. Most of the CMS offer security plugins so that you can improve the security of your website.
Security plugins for WordPress:
- iThemes Security
- Bulletproof Security
- Sucuri
- Wordfence
- fail2Ban
Security options for Magento:
- Amasty
- Watchlog Pro
- MageFence
Security extensions for Joomla:
- JHackGuard
- jomDefender
- RSFirewall
- Antivirus Website Protection
These plugins prove helpful in barring security vulnerabilities. You can also opt for siteLock. It supports both CMS managed and HTML pages. SiteLocks does regular monitoring for all security loopholes including malware detection, vulnerability identification, active virus scanning, etc.
2. Use HTTPS
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate helps in secure-transfer of information amid the website and the server. There is a lot of secure information that we need to share through the websites.
The secure transaction ensures the end clients to freely transact their information without worrying about the treats the insecure transfer of sensitive information can bring.
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The security of your website plays a very important in today’s world unless your clients are satisfied and trust your security system, they will not share their sensitive information with you. SSL is an important way to convince your customers about the security of their information.
3. Keep your website platform and software up-to-date
One of the main causes of security threats on the website is vulnerabilities in CMS’s extensible components. Many of these extensible components are open source, and hackers could easily detect the security vulnerabilities and take control and exploit your website.
To ensure the security of your website your CMS, plugins needs to be updated.
4. Make sure your passwords are secure
Making your password strong might not seem to be a very unique and dominant idea, but the fact is keeping your password strong plays a very important role. It is important that you keep your password strong.
It should be long enough, with special characters, numbers, letters, etc. Avoid keeping your password on the names of special people in your life and on special dates of your life. It gets easier for hackers to hack such a password.
Not only you, but your team should also follow these rules so that the hackers could not enter your system through any of your team member’s ID.
5. Invest in automatic backups
Even after following all the precautionary methods, there are still few chances of you getting attacked by hackers. The best way in such cases is to have a backup copy of your website. In case you do not have a backup copy, you might land lose everything.
Though data breaches are very stressful no matter what, having a backup can give you a levy to recover your website easily. But sometimes you might forget to back up your website, regularly and hence investing in the automatic backup can give you peace of mind.
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The above steps are easy to follow and can even be followed by people with minimal technical knowledge, but here we move on to some more complicated ways to protect your website from hackers.
These advanced techniques might require a technically skilled person and also ensure a higher level of security from hackers.
6. Be cautious while accepting file uploads.
Allowing uploads to your website can be pretty dangerous. Hackers can upload malicious files to your system and can gain access to your system, overwrite existing files, can bring your website down, etc. hence, it is very important to check the kind of files that are being uploaded to your system.
If not required, do not permit file uploads at all. But if it’s a necessity, do keep a check on it. The following points may help you to protect your website by the hackers.
- Allow only specific file types to be uploaded to your system.
- The above point can be easily defied by renaming the file. Hence it is highly recommended to use file type verification.
- Set maximum file size and reject all the files over this size.
- Scan files for malware. Use antivirus software to check all files before opening.
- Use a system to automatically rename a file when uploaded to your system. In such a case hackers will keep looking for their file to accomplish their notorious intentions.
- Do not include upload folder in the web root, it will keep hackers away from accessing your website using their uploaded file.
- These steps can prove helpful in defending your website from file uploads risks.
7. Use Parameterized Queries
SQL injections are a widely used method to hack websites by hackers. SQL injections can be exploited if your website has a web form or URL parameters that accept information from outsiders.
It these parameters are way too open they let the hackers exploit your website by inserting them with the codes that allow them to access your database. Though there are many ways to protect your website from hackers using SQL injections the easiest way is to use parameterized queries.
8. Use CSP
Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are another very common way that allows hackers to slip malicious JavaScript code into your website. This code can further infect the devices of the users of the website exposed to that code.
The easy way to defend your website from such abuses is to ensure that the code that accepts input that is categorical in accepting the inputs. It protects your website from getting induced to any malicious scripts and keeps it protected.
Content Security Policy (CSP) is also an effective tool to protect your website from XSS attacks. It permits you to allow specify domains a browser should consider.
9. Restrict the permissions for directories and files
There are several files and folders inside your web hosting account. They contain data that makes your website work and also includes the permissions on who can read, write, and execute the files and folders.
Ensure these rights are properly set to ensure the highest safety of your website. Any intrusion to these files and folders can put your website security on risk.
10. Be careful about the error messages.
Error messages can play a huge role in putting your website security on risk. How? Here it is: a detailed error message tells you what is wrong with your website and how can you rectify it. It can help you a lot internally. But if the same messages are displayed to your visitors they can exploit these messages and find vulnerabilities in your website and can exploit them.
Ensure that the error messages are not very detailed one that can give hackers a chance to get inside your system. But also make sure that these messages give an idea to the visitors to what to do next in case an error occurs.
11. Do proper validation
Validation has to be done both on both on the browser side and server-side. Imagine that someone is trying to inject code through one of the mandatory fields. The browser has to reject such an invalid input.
When it comes to validation like this it has been performed on server-side also to ensure that malicious code hasn’t been injected to the website.
Conclusion:
Hacking is a very common practice in the digital world that has put on stake the security of your systems. Your website can too be easily exploited by hackers. It is very important that you take enough preventive methods to secure your website from hackers.
The security threats to your website can not only harm you and your business but can be equally harassing for your audiences. Ensure that you take proper measures to protect your website from hackers.