Is Your Website Secure?

We have all heard about websites being hacked and filled with advertisements for merchandise or porn links. Norse Corporation (Computer & Network Security), has a cool map showing what the current attacks look like on any given day, reports on its about us page, “we’ve built the biggest dedicated threat detection network in the world, and populated it with millions of honeypots, agents, sensors and crawlers.” Norse offers enterprise customers a hardline appliance to deter such attacks.

Forbes, reports in an article by James Lyne entitled, 30,000 Web Sites Hacked A Day. How Do You Host Yours?, “Today the cyber criminals mostly use websites to distribute their nasty code.”

Is your web site secure? Connectech has some tips and best practice suggestions for you.

First off, you may wonder if your web site is hacked or not?  An important tool to use is Google’s safe browsing checker which can  scan your site and return detailed information about the last time Google crawled the site, any suspicious activity associated with the site, and whether your site has been identified as a distributor of, or intermediary for, malware. It takes seconds, and is absolutely free. Just type in your domain name in the search box to scan your site and note the results. Wired has an article about what to do if your website has been hacked, and Connectech has experience removing malware from a hacked web site with one of our clients.

Another tool to consider is using isithacked.com and type in your web site domain name to see the results. Sometimes hackers want to be subtle about the hack so that it is not obvious to you or your visitors that your website has been hacked. This is done to continue using your web site as a means to download malware on your site visitors’ computers or use some other nefarious purpose with your web site without you knowing or your website visitors knowing what happens when they download something from your website.

Second, you may want to know how to secure your website, which is the purpose of this post. Connectech has experience dealing with website security and offers these suggestions:

1. Obtaining a host with back up security for your web site such as 1and1 or GoDaddy (we recommend both companies) having the following measures: (a) Multiple redundant connections to major internet hubs, (b) ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified, (c) detects distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks early and implements the necessary counter-measures to keep your site safe and available for your visitors, (d) encrypted protocols like SFTP or FTPS to transfer your files. (e) Obtain SSL security (Public Key Certificate) with 1and1 or Godaddy.
2. Take some security measures for your website above and beyond what your host offers depending on the type of website software you use, i.e. WordPress, Drupal, etc.
3. Use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to monitor your website for unusual activity which are free. In addition you could pay for a monitoring service such as Securi or other monitoring service.
4. Insure you have frequent backups of your website

If you need Connectech to enhance the security of your website contact us for an investigation into what we recommend for your domain.