Common Threats You Need to Protect Your Website Against

Your business website in many ways is more important than a physical lobby. When potential customers look for information about products you sell or your company’s information in particular, the functionality of your website database plays a large role in their first impression. It can also be the difference between a sale and no sale, whether a user encounters problems in the buying process. For all these reasons and more, it’s good to safeguard yourself against threats that can compromise your business’s website. Here are 8 of the most common to look out for!

Viruses

Aptly named after physical viruses that spread and replicate in the human system, computer viruses are a kind of software or “malware” that does the same within a system resulting in slowed performance, frequent crashes, pop-up windows, homepage changes, and emails you didn’t send from your website. They are designed to record, steal, alter, and destroy a system as well as any information on it. The best ways to avoid a virus are to update software, plugins, and themes, increase the strength of your passwords, and avoid downloading attachments and other files that are not verified. If you start experiencing problems, installing anti-virus software and plugins or employing a digital agency to secure your site will cull the virus before it spreads.

Spyware

To get more in depth on types of malware, let’s talk next about spyware, the kind of software that is made to find and take your personal information, relaying it to people like advertisers, data firms, or even criminals. Spyware can be installed without your consent onto your business website, and then begin stealing both you and your employees’ information as well as users that go onto your website. They do this by monitoring and recording data via methods like keystrokes or screen captures. In effect, problems from spyware include computer damages, data theft, and even identity fraud. For your business, Google Analytics may notice malware on your website and take it out of the algorithm. If you encounter this, internet security providers offer software that spy out spyware and remove it.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks can happen to anyone, including businesses. Email phishing scams work to perfectly replicate an accredited source in an email message, convincing a person to click on the link they provide and enter information or download something malicious. Often it asks for a person to change their password, and then records the original password to then access your company website themselves. You can spot a phishing attempt on your own by looking at the link itself, which is usually misspelled deliberately to take you somewhere different than it suggests, and noting the level of urgency in the message itself. You can also use preventative measures such as two-factor authentication, so that just a password is not enough for a hacker to access your system.

Ransomware

A very pernicious kind of malware, ransomware works by gaining access to data or a computer system and then encrypting it for ransom. Whether by threatening to publish the data or entirely blocking access to it, ransomware holds data hostage until a certain amount is paid. It’s also pretty impossible to recover from, whether you choose to pay the ransom or not. The important thing, if you aren’t dealing with this malware right now, is to reduce your chances of getting attacked by putting more focus on your security infrastructure. Every business has IT security needs, and this is especially true if your whole business is your website. With that in mind, it’s smart to invest in antivirus software and secure email gateways.

Botnets

When you think of botnets, imagine an entire horde of infected zombies coming after you instead of just one. It’s a lot harder to defend yourself against so many attacks at once, and the same goes for botnets attacking your website system. Botnets work as traffic to overwhelm a system’s bandwidth, overloading processing capabilities until it is under hacker control. To fight against them, good security software uses things such as RFC3704 filtering, which denies such shady traffic, and black hole filtering, a way of rerouting the traffic to a null interface instead.

Session Hijacking

One of your system’s most vulnerable moments is anytime you’re trying to connect to a network and talk with a client. Online attackers use malware to detect a legitimate client trying to join your server, gain control themselves, disconnect the client, use their legitimate IP address as their own, and continue speaking with you as if they were the client. One great way to avoid session hijacking is by using a virtual private network (VPN) to mask your IP address. You can also generate a session key or employ an identity verification before the user can connect.

IP Spoofing

Similar to session hijacking, IP spoofing essentially involves a hacker using malware to convince a system that it is legitimate and trusted, whether by stealing the address of a real entity or by overriding the system itself. The goal then is to send a package of malware or virus to infiltrate the system, which accepts and downloads the files thanks to the IP source address the hacker is hiding behind. Though there are different methods, in the end it’s all about stealing identity in order to invade and obtain information.

Password Attack

One of the most common problems for a reason, people are constantly getting their accounts hacked into thanks to hackers guessing passwords. Though there’s the brute-force method of simply guessing your password based on a person’s name and known information, many hackers like to copy encrypted files which contain the website’s passwords, and then compare that with the encryption results of common passwords. A lockout policy on accounts can combat this, so that it is frozen after a certain number of attempts.

The internet has a lot of amazing software to help your business, but beware of the malware only out to exploit you. If you have encountered any kind of attack on your website security, it won’t be the last time. Stay informed and put in place preventative measures so that your business stays secure!

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