Ways To Protecting Your Website from Cyber Attacks

The importance of security should be at the top of your list of priorities when it comes to gaining a better understanding of how to create a website.

As the number of websites throughout the world continues to rise—it reached a new high of 1.86 billion websites in the first half of 2021 alone—the number of cyber attacks also continues to rise accordingly. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), up to 4,000 cyber attacks occur every single day. Since the year 2020, the number of attacks on websites in the United States has climbed by about 400%. Additionally, it is anticipated that by the year 2023, the total number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) that occur all over the world will exceed 15.4 million numbers.

All websites are susceptible to security and privacy breaches as a result of the growing sophistication of cyber attacks. It is absolutely necessary to be aware of how to protect your website from these kinds of assaults in order to save your data.

What exactly is safety on a website?

Your website and its infrastructure are protected against malevolent online attackers who can access, modify, and steal your website’s content and data. Website security is the protection of your website and your website’s infrastructure. In addition to this, it should safeguard the users’ personal information and privacy on your website. A complete awareness of the fundamentals of cybersecurity is something that any person or company that has a website ought to have in order to guarantee that their website is protected from attacks.

You are required to have faith that the data on your website is safe. Attacks on the internet are becoming more common and complex as time goes on. Due to this, it is especially challenging for security professionals to identify them, let alone website developers. When you use the appropriate website builder, security will be a top priority, allowing you to concentrate on your business.

Why is it vital to secure a website properly?

There are a lot of reasons why website security is crucial, including the following:

For the purpose of safeguarding the personal and financial information of your clients. Customers’ personal information, including their names, addresses, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers, could be stolen by cybercriminals if your website is vulnerable to hacking. In the future, this information might be utilized to perform crimes such as identity theft or other offenses.

So as to safeguard the reputation of your company. A website hack can be detrimental to your company’s reputation and undermine the faith of your customers. Customers are less likely to continue doing business with you if they have the impression that the information they provide on your website is not secure.

In order to prevent monetary losses. A website hack can result in a multitude of financial losses, including the expense of cleaning up the infection, the cost of paying for legal and regulatory compliance, and the cost of compensating customers for damages.

For the purpose of preventing virus attacks from spreading to other systems on your network. It is possible that malicious software could be distributed to your other computer systems, such as your servers and databases if your website is compromised and used by cybercriminals. As a result, your company’s operations could be severely disrupted, which would result in even greater financial losses.

Furthermore, in addition to these broad reasons, the importance of website security cannot be overstated when it comes to certain categories of websites, such as websites that deal with healthcare and eCommerce. Due to the fact that eCommerce websites handle sensitive consumer data and financial information, it is of utmost importance to secure them from being affected by an attack. Information that is sensitive to patients is stored on healthcare websites, which makes them an attractive target for cybercriminals.

Instances of attacks against websites

The security of a website can be compromised in a variety of different ways. They are all possible. In the following, we will discuss some of the most common ones that manifest themselves, as well as the possible dangers that they may cause to your website:

The injection of SQL

Injections of SQL entail the use of search query language, which is a sort of computer code, in order to gain control of a database and extract sensitive information. An attack of this kind can also be used to edit, modify, or remove information contained within a database. It can also be used to retrieve passwords or user information. There were 6.2 billion attempted SQL injections between January 2020 and June 2021, as stated in Akamai’s State of the Internet/Security Report. This places SQL injections at the top of the list of most prevalent web attacks.

SQL assaults pose a significant risk to the security of your website and the information it contains. It is possible for these cyber-attacks to have an effect on the functionality of your website and result in the loss of important user data. A password that is collected from your website, for instance, might be used to break into the accounts of your users across a number of other online sites.

The ransomware

There is a type of harmful software known as ransomware that is used to infect computers. It has the ability to prevent access to files, systems, software, and applications once it has been uploaded. A payment is then demanded from the user who has been afflicted by the ransomware, and after the ransom is paid, the computer and all files associated with it are decrypted, and the ransomware is uninstalled.

During the year 2021, ransomware attacks were carried out against a wide variety of entities, including public hospitals, government bodies, and significant enterprises. The vast majority of these ransomware attacks were the consequence of phishing. Computers and systems become infected when employees receive a phishing email and then click on a malicious link contained within the email.

There has been an increase in the number of ransomware assaults, and the year 2021 was an especially busy one, thanks to the fact that 37 percent of business organizations reported being victims of a ransomware attack. On a year-on-year basis, the FBI reported a 62% rise in the number of attacks of this kind during the first half of 2021 alone.

XSS stands for cross-site scripting.

An attack known as cross-site scripting takes place when malicious JavaScript code is introduced into a user’s browser by means of a website that is considered to be trustworthy. This kind of attack operates in a manner that is analogous to that of a SQL injection attack, and it takes advantage of the fact that browsers are unable to discern between malicious and innocent elements of markup language. This means that browsers just render any text that they receive, regardless of the meaning behind it.

Cross-site scripting is frequently utilized in order to steal cookies, which are information that is kept on a user’s computer, and then impersonate that user while they are online. The editing of websites and the collection of secure user credentials (such as passwords or credit card details) are further possible applications of this method. Considering that there were an estimated 1.019 billion attacks of this kind between January 2020 and June 2021, it should come as no surprise that safeguarding against cross-site scripting is an essential component of website security.

Reusing of credentials

It is possible that the theft of user credentials will have an effect on more than simply your website. In addition to causing harm that is distributed across a number of websites at the same time, they can be used to gain access to other websites when the same credentials are used.

The fact that users frequently reuse their credentials across a variety of websites and online platforms is one of the primary reasons why credential reuse attacks are among the most prevalent dangers to the security of websites. Therefore, gaining access to even just one of these makes it possible to access more than just the website from which they were taken.

DDoS and DDoS assaults

Denial of service assaults, also known as DoS attacks, are designed to disrupt the functionality and usability of a website. DDoS attacks, also known as distributed denial of service attacks, are among the most popular types of cyberattacks. A bot is said to be engaging in this practice when it sends massive volumes of bogus traffic to a website from a variety of sources in an effort to overwhelm the server.

A denial of service attack will result in a server timeout and will make the website that is being attacked inaccessible. This has the potential to be extremely detrimental to websites of any size, having a detrimental effect on the performance of websites.

The repercussions of security breaches on websites

Internet attacks have the potential to have a major and long-lasting impact on the functionality and performance of your website. They have the potential to restrict the growth of traffic and conversions in the short term. They have the potential to cause harm to your company’s reputation and brand identity over the course of time. Breach of security can have a number of serious consequences, including the following:

A loss of customers

It is essential for users to have the assurance that their data is secure in order for them to trust and utilize your website, as well as return as repeat consumers. In order for users to click on a call to action (CTA) or make a purchase, it is essential that they trust your website. There is no doubt that malicious assaults that result in the loss of sensitive information and credentials belonging to customers will have an effect on how website visitors and customers perceive your company. It is sad that this will have ramifications that extend beyond your website, as it will also have an impact on the reputation of your business and the quality of client support.

The blacklisting of search engines:

When a website’s security is breached, the result can be extremely detrimental in the form of blacklisting by search engines. It is possible that Google will decide to blacklist a website if it crawls that website and discovers malware or dangerous code on that website. This will make the website more difficult to locate through search. On the other hand, this can also result in significant declines in traffic, which can have a detrimental effect on a website’s capacity to attract new consumers and keep existing ones.

In a similar vein, websites that encounter consistent downtime and server difficulties frequently face problems with page crawling. In the event that Google crawls a page and discovers a server-down error, which is typically a 500 error, the company has the ability to terminate the crawling process for that page. This has a significant impact on the visibility of a website in search engines as well as its capacity to attract new visitors.

Suspension of service

Critical website features, such as the ability to log in, join up, and shop, might be rendered inaccessible in the event of a security breach. As a consequence of this, it may be challenging for users to interact with your website. Rather than having to deal with the aftermath of security assaults, it is much preferable to prevent security attacks from occurring in the first place by implementing a robust website security plan. Malware removal is both expensive and time-consuming.

Instructions on how to make your website more secure

One of the first steps in ensuring the safety of your website is selecting the appropriate website builder. Choose one that places a high priority on website security, which will ensure that you are free to concentrate on managing your website. The following is a rundown of the seven procedures that you and your website builder ought to do in order to properly safeguard your website:

1. The core platform and upgrades from third parties

Even though there are known dangers associated with cyber attacks, the security of your website ought to be something that you shouldn’t have to worry about. Listen to us out, even though this can appear to be counterintuitive.

If you build your website from the ground up on a platform that is monitored around the clock, you will have complete peace of mind regarding the safety of your website and, by extension, your company. When it comes to the protection of your website, you are ahead of the game if you use a platform that does vulnerability scans and subsequently implements upgrades in response to the findings.

It is possible for third-party applications to be a significant contributor to site security breaches, which have the potential to affect millions of websites all at once. In order to prevent this from occurring, we suggest selecting a website builder that comes equipped with as many built-in capabilities as you require to manage your company successfully. As a result, you will become less reliant on applications developed by third parties and more focused on your company.

2. The protocols of SSL

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, which may be identified by the presence of the https at the beginning of a domain name within the URL of a website, is a component of a website that is considered to be secure. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol encrypts the communication that takes place between the server and the website. Hackers are unable to read or otherwise manipulate the information that is being transferred from one party to another as a result of this. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a system that should be standard on any newly developed website, but it is especially crucial for websites that conduct online sales and transactions. In order to deal with more complex attempts to break SSL’s encryption, the protocols that support SSL have recently been changed.

You will automatically create a website with additional layers of safety when you use a website builder such as Wix. This is because you will be using the most up-to-date and secure protocol, which is TLS 1.2. In addition to being able to design and administer whatever kind of website you require, from a personal website to an eCommerce website, you can have peace of mind knowing that your data and the data of your customers are protected in accordance with the most stringent industry standards. Select a website builder that places a high priority on website security. You can visit our Security Hub to find out more about the ways in which Wix safeguards your website.

3. Backup of the website

Your website’s ability to recover quickly in the case of a security breach is contingent on the fact that it is backed up. The greatest website security solutions entail preventing attacks from occurring in the first place. In order to accomplish this, you will need to save a separate version of your website and ensure that it can be restored in the event that the primary version is compromised in any manner.

All of the websites that are created by several website builders, including Wix, are backed up automatically. There is no need for you to do anything, but you can be sure that your website will be preserved. To ensure that your website is backed up automatically, we suggest that you verify with your website builder or your site developer right from the beginning. This will ensure that you are not missing any important information.

4 Modify the CMS settings of the default

The default settings of your content management system (CMS) should not be altered, as this makes it simpler for hackers to break into your website. Make sure that you modify these when you are creating your website. For instance, you can begin by modifying your comments and user settings. One method for accomplishing this is by assigning distinct privilege roles to each of your website administrators.

Any modifications made to these basic settings will make it more challenging for hackers to comprehend your system, hence reducing the likelihood that it will be attacked. An increasing number of cyber-attacks are being carried out by bots, which are able to comprehend and circumvent the default settings of a variety of content management systems (CMS). If you change these parameters, it will be more difficult for these bots to read your platform and launch attacks against it.

5. Always use the best practices for passwords

Changing the password for your website on a regular basis can protect you from attacks that target your credentials. Choose passwords that are robust, making sure to utilize a combination of letters, digits, and characters (a helpful hint: the longer the password, the more secure it is). In addition to this, it is essential to remember that you should never reveal your password to anybody else or save it on your browser. Whenever possible, try to avoid using the same one across many websites. Take measures to ensure that all individuals who have access to your website are aware of how to protect their login credentials.

In addition, the implementation of multi-factor authentication (also known as MFA) is strongly suggested. Because of this, it will be more challenging for potential hackers to gain access to your website. A push notification from a mobile device is one example of the additional level of authentication that will be required for multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Conclusion:

It is necessary to use a preventative and multi-layered approach in order to safeguard your website against cyber threats. Implementing the tactics that were discussed before and maintaining a state of vigilance are two ways in which you can considerably lessen the likelihood of being a victim of malevolent acts. Security for websites is an ongoing process; therefore, it is important to assess and update your security measures on a regular basis in order to respond to new threats and maintain the security of your website.