Websites are essentially your business’s storefront. They display to passing visitors the products and services your business is offering: they offer a window into your business. Similar to traditional stores, your website is also prone to theft and random acts of destruction.
A live website is a game hunting ground for cybercriminals. Not securing your site adequately is akin to leaving the business safe open while you serve customers in a traditional store. While most of your customers are good and honest folk, it won’t take long for a malicious person to enter your office and clear the safe.
Cybercriminals are intent on stealing or holding your data for ransom, but hackers are intent on causing chaos. They may delete your valuable business critical data or spam your customers with offensive messages and images. Hackers have many methods for spreading Discordia, but all share the ability to damage your business’s reputation.
With that in mind, here’s how you can prevent attack by cybercriminals and hackers:
Be alert
Being alert to the current threats that are doing the rounds is essential to protect your business. If you are knowledgeable about the present risks, you will be able to activate specific securities for that threat.
Tighten control
Limit the number of login attempts and the IP addresses that admin users can have to access your website. Once a hacker can access a website, they share the access information with other criminals, so it is likely that you will come under multiple attacks.
Introduce multi-factor authentication to add an extra layer of protection to your website and ensure that they are updated to more complex passwords regularly. Never send login details via e-mail.
Hide admin pages
Your admin pages should be hidden so that they are unable to be indexed. By hiding the admin pages, you are reducing the ability of the cybercriminals and hackers to be able to locate them. Talented professionals at the Hook Agency – Minneapolis Web Design will design a website that is visitor and search engine friendly, but a foe to hackers.
Remove auto-fill forms
Reverting to the analogy of your website as an open office, auto-fill forms are the equivalent of leaving the window open too. Auto-fill forms are an easy way for hackers to enter the architecture of your website.
Limit file uploads
Loading foreign files to your website is a chief access point to business websites for cybercriminals. No matter what system you have in place, there are none that are 100% safe; bugs will always slip through the net. If your business is reliant on uploaded files, make sure that they are stored on an external system and only access them through a script.
While you can’t entirely undo the damage caused by cybercriminals and hackers, you can take affirmative action to prevent them from being able to harm your business; even simple security measures can be enough to put them off or at least delay the attack. As a matter of course, you should always make sure that your security is updated and on!
