How Do We Prevent Our Website From Being Hacked?
The first thing you should do is identify what caused the problem that allowed hackers to hack your site in the first place. This so that you can arm yourself and do everything you can to prevent it from happening again. The next step is to inform your visitors and users of the calamities in the most relaxed way possible and tell them how you will solve the cases.
Because when your website is offline, this costs you money. However, it can be much more damaging in the case of negligence, damaging your entire reputation, even leading to, as we can often hear from the media, bankruptcy. Think of the incident with Diginotar, which ran on an outdated version of DotNetNuke, or more recently, the many examples around Joomla, WordPress, or Typo3.
4 Ways Hackers Can Access Your Website
In this article, I’ll give 5 possible ways that Hackers may have gained access to your website. The list below contains some of the common ways websites are hacked, as well as a few things you can do to protect your website. Read the points carefully and take advantage of them.
1. The Hosting Provider
Is a Threat It often happens that many websites hosted by the same hosting provider are all hacked at the same time. In these cases, the problem usually lies with the hosting provider. Either their servers have some vulnerabilities exploited by a hacker. The hackers have figured out a way to access a website on a server and use it to infect the other websites hosted on the server.
To ensure that this problem does not occur with your hosting provider or to make sure that it is not your hosting provider, it is good to report your hacked website to your hosting provider immediately.
If your host has a bad track record when it comes to hacked websites, you should consider moving (migrating) your website to another hosting provider with better security in place for their servers. The tip cheap is expensive buy seems appropriate here.
2. Your computer or the web developer is a threat
Sometimes the core of the problem lies in the underlying computers used to develop websites and not in the websites themselves. Hackers can infect computers, for example, your computer with which you build your website, but also the computers of your web developer (the company that builds the website for you) with malware, allowing them to steal things such as stored passwords or infect files with their software that is uploaded to the server where your website is located. Then the hacker automatically has access to your website.
To prevent this, your computers, which are used to access a website via FTP or SSH, should be regularly scanned for spyware, viruses, and malware? Also, unencrypted passwords should never be stored in FTP programs. Also, We recommend using web developers with a proven track record who also have procedures or have thought about the further development and security of the websites.
Finally, at this point, We recommend that, with every secure area of the website, always use a safe and trusted network. So access websites via HTTPS instead of HTTP, where the ‘s’ stands for secure. This security can be applied in different layers, from 128 bits encryption, which is easier to hack, to 2048 bits, which is very difficult to hack because much heavier. We apply this latest version for websites and software from Snake ware.
3. Passwords used are leaked or not strong.
When it comes to passwords, these can only protect you or your website’s users when they are strong. This means that passwords must meet the following criteria.
- Unique
Create a different password for each software package you use. So whether it’s FTP, CMS, email, etc., always create unique passwords and never use the same one multiple times.
- Complex
Passwords should not be easy to guess. The best passwords contain no words and are a combination of numbers, symbols, uppercase, and lowercase letters. A tip I can give you here is to make a number, symbols, upper and lower case version of at least eight characters from a word.
- Private
Keep your passwords to yourself and think about how you share them. So even when providing passwords for your website, for example, at web shops, to users, it is wise not to send them as plain text but, for instance, as an image. As we do at Snake ware, another commonly used solution is to send a temporary password that is changed into a unique and complex password after acceptance by the recipient in the email.
- Do it yourself
When you receive passwords from suppliers, no matter how unique, complex, and private, I recommend that you always replace them immediately. In other words, you create unique, complex personal passwords yourself.
- Regular
Updates periodically updating your passwords reduce the chance that a leaked password can be used to gain access to your website.
Perhaps unnecessarily, but if your website has been hacked, make sure that the hacker has not created any unauthorized accounts that can then be used for another hacking attempt. In other words, thoroughly check all stores in your CMS, for example.
4. Content Management Software is a threat
Websites use content management systems (CMS) to make it easier to manage content or maintain other functionality.
There is also a significant disadvantage to using a CMS, especially the many variants of open source software with its many plugins and often unclear update strategies. No matter which open source CMS is used, there are always security holes that hackers can exploit.
It’s advisable to use genuine CMS systems, plugins and themes with good rating & review, and which are provide updated regularly. And, regularly update your CMS with latest version.