A small data breach can already lead to very serious consequences for companies, such as lost sales, damage to reputation, or complaints. Many businesses, especially online stores, enjoy customers’ trust, who reveal their personal data, their bank details, and those related to credit cards. Their protection is of premium above all due to cyber-attacks, which are the order of the day in the online business sector. They also attributes to those responsible for the web pages a duty of vigilance. In addition to the usual security checks, companies can adopt alternative security measures to protect their web pages.
Open systems – also for hackers
The promise of many providers: create your page with a few clicks. And, truth be told, nowadays you don’t need deep programming skills to create a presentable website in no time. The market knows today numerous applications to publish blogs, shops, or news portals, but all these content managers, ecommerce systems, or software for forums also represent a great risk for security. And is that “open source” means that the code is available to all users and hackers, and other cybercriminals.
An alternative that allows you to comfortably create a website without having to use a content management system is modular web design. With a program that follows this principle, a web page can be composed like a construction game without having to worry about complicated technical adjustments. This means that certain protection measures are also delegated to the software provider. The difference is that in this case, experts are responsible for these tasks so that users can dedicate themselves completely and with complete peace of mind to their project.
5 tips to increase web security
To make the task difficult for hackers, it is convenient for companies to take different security measures. Here are five strategies that can be adopted without a huge expenditure of time and money.
1. Take care of the actuality of the technique
The Internet community is constantly developing open source solutions, often identifying bugs and security flaws quickly and eliminating them even faster. But you can only take advantage of the community’s responsiveness and the developer team when you keep the system up to date. In many CMS, updates can be automated with certain plugins. With the Easy Update Manager for WordPress, you can keep the system up to date and contribute to the website’s security. Since both plugins and add-ons are stand-alone programs, they must be checked separately for their up-to-date.
However, you should also check the updates on your page even if you created it without a CMS’s help. For example, PHP and MySQL should always be up-to-date so as not to offer any open doors to intruders.
2. Take regular backups
Suppose, despite having carried out the corresponding security measures, hackers have managed to access the system. In that case, they can cause significant damage in terms of spying or misuse of data and rewriting or erasing entire databases to avoid leaving traces. For this purpose, it is advisable to protect all applicable material on a regular basis, as it is also possible to rewrite individually adapted data files in certain conditions with a standard update: regular backup copies of all data is, for this reason, an obligation.
There are also support tools for this: for WordPress, you have different plugins, but also other CMS can be equipped with extensions that make it easy to make complete copies of websites. If you work without CMS, you can save the server content on another device.
3. Secure access data
Using secure access data should be a no-brainer, but the reality is very different: apparently and bizarre as it may sound, according to statistics, the favorite password is still â123456â. Many users even keep the user names suggested by the system, such as “Admin” or “Administrator,” unchanged. If these are combined with weak passwords, they become easy targets for hackers. It is not recommended for both user names and passwords to use obvious or very simple names or very obvious combinations. A secure key must be composed of a random sequence of characters and must be of a certain length. To find out how a strong password can be generated, read our guide, and learn how to create a strong password.
4. Stay informed
If you want to protect your website from attacks by hackers and other cybercriminals, it is best to inform yourself about the latest dangers and security breaches. At first, the community is a good reference. In most forums, you will find a lot of information about online safety. In them, these risks are often detected for the first time, discussed, and eliminated immediately in the best of cases. Take a look at the National Cyber security Institute website or the Internet User Security Office website to find out about the risks you may face and about the protection tools that interest you the most.
5. HTTPS and SSL certificate
While HTTPS ensures the exchange of sensitive data, with the help of SSL (Secure Socket Layer), said data exchange between the server and the client is done in an encrypted manner. This is how hackers find it impossible to read or capture the transmitted data. This certificate can be purchased from various websites, is included in many providers’ web hosting packages, or is purchased for a premium. Another advantage is that the visitor is able to recognize the security certificate of the web page thanks to the padlock symbol that appears in the browser and in the HTTPS transfer protocol, both signals that inspire confidence in the potential client.
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