Is Your Website Secure?

Website hacking and malware injection has become so frequent these days. It results in stealing personal information of the website users and sometimes can even lead to system wide hack if not careful. 

Website owners aren't aware of the risks lurking in the internet world and therefore they don't know the consequences of those risks. Small and medium businesses think they cannot be targeted since they are not big or important enough to be noticed. This mindset full of ignorance is one of the reasons even small-time hackers using automated tools can find loopholes and exploit it for their gains. Harming the website is nothing less than a personal injury.

A website is a very important place, it’s a spokesperson of your brand, the first point of contact in today's world. It needs to be safe. Users are smart, if they sense your website doesn't carry necessary security measures, they might go away. If your website is injected with malware, it could allow hackers to steal user information. Your site will earn bad reputation among the community resulting in fewer visitors and lesser chances of conversion. 

According to Serpninja, a website is the most important asset of a business. If there's a security breach or jacking of site, it could lead to probable business closer or massive loss. Not only that, the business may have to face harsh laws for compromising user security and penalties. Further, when established customers hear about this breach, they may lose the trust that was built over the years. 

 Every user is aware of the security threats on the internet, especially threats that cause identity theft. Small businesses suffer from trust issues most as there is a notion of SMBs not spending enough on security. When a consumer notices good security, not only it starts trusting the site, but the consumer also publicizes it among their friends and family. 

The success of a business is correlated with consumer trust. If a business does good in terms of securing their site, more people are likely to put faith, visit and even buy services or products. This progresses with them returning to buy again and even lauding your site to other people. For example, if a user visits a site, and there's no SSL certification, a prompt warning appears saying potential risk ahead. Even if there wasn't one. The user gets discouraged and feels insecure about visiting the site. It can lead customers to think they can have personal losses if they visit your website.

Once a business website has been hit, cleaning up is the only option. But cleaning up doesn’t necessarily solve everything. You gotta start over. It is always wise to convert your website html to pdf and take backup. Your code might have injected malware. You can lose revenue, you lose trust, you lose search engine visibility and you have to invest in everything all over again. Even if you tried cleaning it yourself, the damage won’t undo. Chances are, you won’t be able to malware because hackers put a lot of effort to make sure you don’t find it easily. On the other hand, if a business opt for good security, it can avoid extra expenses to incur in future. It costs way less to secure the website than cleaning. If your website gets hit, you can should redesign it by using the archive or html to image backup.

There’s a lot that can be done in terms of site security. Like an SSL certificate. It encrypts a message to deliver. Also known as tunneling, data is put at the one end of SSL and collect from the other end of SSL. SSL encryption saves a site from eavesdropping and prevents message tampering. 

One Shell One Body. Meaning, a business must host one site on one server even if the plan includes multiple sites and unlimited data. If you host multiple websites on a single hosting server, chances of cross-site contamination increases.

A business mustn't share site credentials with many people and should be kept confidential. The credentials are more valuable to a company than any working individual. Share it with only few people assigned to handle and manage site. 

Always keep a latest backup of the site. In case the site gets infected with a malware, you can clean it up, upload the back up and get started again where you left. It is essential that you take the backup outside the website server, if the backup is on the same server as the site, chances of infecting the backup increases many folds. Though, you are allowed to file a cyber complaint in legal ways, but the malware injector can hire a criminal defense lawyer to get out. So be safe and keep backups.

If you’re a business and you don’t want to regret later in time:

1. Ensure you spend decent bucks on website security.

2. Have a good team to look after the vulnerabilities and get it fixed ASAP.

3. You wouldn’t want to face a downtime costing you reputation, revenue and time.