Guest post by Carol Evenson - Business Growth Expert
Websites breaches have happened even to the world's largest corporations. With each passing day, there is news of a brand new leak of personal and corporate information over the internet. Even top secret classified government data have been released on the internet by hackers. The internet lacks security at every possible level.
As an African entrepreneur, your website is no exception. Hackers can hack your website database and manipulate or destroy information by injecting your content with malicious links. According to Blue Coat and IDC, only 65% of corporations have a clear security policy in place to prevent online data breaches. Therefore, data protection is an important area of concern irrespective of how small your business is. Today, a lot of entrepreneurs use virtual information to market their products and services and it thus not hard to see why a website breach could seriously damage your business.
Without security measures, a website breach could force you out of business. As an entrepreneur, you should be in a position to make hackers sweat for their spoils. To evade being a target of opportunity, there are rules you must follow to keep your business website secure.
Use a firewall
Most website are infiltrated as a result of hackers exploiting insecure codes. The millions of codes that make up your site are what hackers exploit using an attack vector. Once the attack vector is hidden inside the code, your website becomes vulnerable and easy to exploit within a very short time.
A firewall allows you to limit access to specified ports by controlling internet traffic coming into and out of your website. You can also create services that accept connection to prevent non-root users making it almost impossible for an attacker to create a shell backdoor. A firewall also limits outbound connections thus reducing the possibility of reverse shells. Your website security depends on you minimizing attack surface, a component that is well provided by a firewall.
You can turn to security software companies for a web application firewall to protect your website. This firewall protects your website by scanning and analyzing malware to protect your infrastructure from disguised threats and attacks. A firewall also improves application performance by accelerating delivery of web applications. It also performs health checks on your website to monitor web content and alert administrators.
Keep all your software updated
As a website owner, it is important to ensure that every piece of software is up to date. Your business's computers should be updated to ensure maximum protection. If you are to install any software, you must maintain it right. All security applications work efficiently if they are up to date. Regular updates keep your website and its users safe.
Updated software is less vulnerable to attacks. Also, clean out any third party plugins that have fallen into disuse as they can be used as a gateway to enter and attack your website.
Use strong passwords that you change regularly
Thousands of websites attacks can be blamed to guessed usernames and passwords combinations. Use of strong passwords eliminates brute and dictionary attacks on your website server. A strong password is made through a combination of alphanumeric characters, upper and lower case characters and symbols. A strong password should at least have 12 characters to make it less vulnerable.
If you have different websites, do not use the same password. Also, change your password regularly to maximize your security. If you have to write down your passwords, remember to store them in encrypted form to ensure no one uses them.
Being cautious is crucial in this modern age. It is important to implement the above steps right away, to secure your website from malicious attacks.