Keeping Your Website Secure and Safe From Hacking
Cyber-attacks could result in data breaches, the loss of customer trust, and in serious cases, major financial losses. On a brighter note, there are several effective workable tips for you to secure and safe your site from hacking. This information will be useful for you.
1. Keep Your Software Up to Date
- Why it is necessary: Security breaches are typically fixed through these updates by developers. Hackers cannot exploit these.
- What should I do? Make sure to regularly update your CMS (e.g. WordPress, Joomla), plugins, and themes. If you use custom software, ask your developer to constantly give you safety information.
2. Use Strong Passwords and Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Weak passwords jeopardize the safety of a website and are the primary target for hacker attacks. In fact, hackers employ modern password-cracking techniques, so thus, it is a must to create strong, unique passwords for your website accounts.
- The factors that create a strong password: A combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Avoid common words and phrases that are known.
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): 2FA does not only mean users requiring to password before accessing the site. They must be able to provide two forms of identification before access. By using this additional layer of security, it is much more difficult for unauthorized parties to hack into your site.
3. Secure Your Website with HTTPS
Your visitors’ security remains at stake if your site is lacking the implementation of HTTPS. The system encrypts the required data between your website and users, therefore it is safe to share information like passwords and include payment details.
- How to implement HTTPS: Obtain an SSL/TLS certificate and install it on your server. Many hosting providers offer free SSL certificates through services like Let’s Encrypt.
4. Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Your Web Application Firewall (WAF) is the castle’s guardian that shields it from the Internet, and so it intercepts and blocks the bad traffic.
- Benefits of a WAF: It protects against common threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and DDoS attacks.
- How to set it up: Many security services, such as Cloudflare or Sucuri, offer WAFs that can be easily integrated with your website.
5. Schedule Regular Backups
No matter how well protected a website is there is still a small chance that it will be hacked at least once. This is where the need for regular back your website gets in.
- Why backups are crucial: In case of a security breach, having a recent backup allows you to restore your site quickly without losing significant data.
- Automate your backups: Use tools or plugins that automatically back up your website at regular intervals. Store these backups in a secure, remote location.
6. Limit User Access and Permissions
Some users are just fine with accessing your website even when they are using their accounts with lesser rights or privileges. The act of restricting users’ access, in particular, is of considerable help to reducing inside threats.
- Assigning roles on necessity: For example, only content creators should have access to the specific, small parts of a site that they need to update, instead of the entire admin panel.
- Regular audits: Regularly check user accounts and disable access for those who no longer require it.
7. Secure File Uploads
- Limit the types of files that could be uploaded: Limit the types of files that are allowed to be uploaded to your site, and thus only allow those, which are important for your website’s proper functioning to be uploaded. File types that your website really needs, and the least amount of other file types are also the file types you could password protect from others.
- Securely store data upload files: Do not store your Data Upload files under the same folder as your website, but store it in a public html folder as an indirect approach of lessening it. By doing so, you prohibit copy and paste titles.
8. Protect Against SQL Injection Attacks
One of the main ways hackers can abuse the SQL attack is by the injection, where they can pull excessive or damaged data from your database.
- Defending SQL Injection: It is very good to use prepared statements and parameterized queries at all times when you are doing complex operations with the database. This is important because without it the server, which runs the web application, can be vulnerable to SQL injection attack.
9. Defend Against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
XSS is a type of attack where intruders insert malevolent codes in the web pages that are being viewed by other users. These codes can take the data, modify web content, and other things.
- How to minimize the risk of XSS: First, filter inputs for any dangerous attacks as only valid inputs shall be accepted. The second step is to use a CSP which restricts the execution of code to only a few types of content.
10. Monitor and Scan for Vulnerabilities
By actively watching out for vulnerabilities on your website, you can tackle the issue well before the manipulation by hackers.
- Security scanners: Use competent and web security tools like SiteLock, Sucuri, or security plugins to systematically check for vulnerabilities on your website.
- Log monitoring: Constantly watch over server logs so that you can identify any strange behavior that might signal a security threat.
