Secure Your Web Site
Thousands of web sites are hacked every day. Hackers and spammers either force entry by brute force guessing your password or they find a backdoor to sneak in via out of date software, bad permissions or poorly written code. Once in, they can install malicious scripts or inject code into your web site. This can lead to unwanted spam being sent from your account to viruses and malware that infect your customers computers.
If the appropriate measures are not taken to remove the infection from your webs site then you can run the risk of being blacklisted. There are a variety of popular blacklists that many anti-virus, security and email providers subscribe to which collect websites that show signs of infection through spam, malware or phishing attacks. Most search engines including Google have their own versions of these lists.
You can be blacklisted for any or all of these things and in most cases, it isn’t your fault, it’s because you’ve been hacked. If you are blacklisted, you’ll need to clean up your website and then ask the company who has blacklisted you to review your case again and hopefully clear it.
So what can be done to prevent this from happening, and what steps can be taken to clean up a web site that has already been compromised?
The easiest step to take in securing your site is to ensure that all your passwords are long and complex. Your hosting control panel, mailboxes and content administration passwords should not be easy to guess, nor should they shared amongst people outside of your business.
Your content management system or shopping cart should also be secured in turn.It’s impossible to cover every variety of web application within this article but if you are using WordPress or Joomla then you should review our security articles as a starting point. Regardless of which web application you use sit down with your web developer and ask them what steps can be taken to update and secure your software to prevent outside attack.
- Joomla Security Guide
- WordPress Security Guide
If you have a web site that has already been compromised then you can look to using a Sucuri a comprehensive website security package which will scan your website for any viruses, bugs or unusual looking code and clean them up for you. Sucuri can also help to monitor your web site and warn you about any unauthorised changes to important files.
You can learn more about Sucuri by visiting their web site at https://sucuri.net/
