Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
According to Sophos Security Report, about 30,000 websites are hacked every day. That’s a lot! However, if you were in the website field, this number would not surprise you. With the increase in businesses, ideas, and concepts growing every year, there’s a reason for a website to go live for each concept. If you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to keeping your website updated and secure, you may not even know your website is being hacked until it’s too late. While it’s almost impossible to ensure that a website is 100% hacker-proof, there are ways and measures to ensure it’s very difficult for them to work their hacker magic.
Hackers Are Everywhere
Hackers can be anywhere and everywhere. They are all over the world working to get into your website while inside a coffee shop, an internet café, or even inside their home. A hacker might even be right next to you as you sit on your computer reading this blog post inside the school computer lab, or in the public library. They have the ability to harm your website and its users, and the interesting part about it is that sometimes you have no idea that its happened. The internet is a scary and vulnerable place for websites that are left unmanaged.
Reasons Why Websites Get Hacked
- An SSL certificate does not exist (HTTPS). An SSL certificate helps ensure that a connection is secure between the browser and the website.
- Plugins are out of date. When plugins are not updated regularly, it leaves holes in the code of your website. This makes injecting malware into your website easier.
- Easy usernames and passwords. When you create a website that contains the ability to log in, such as a WordPress website, if your username and password are common combinations, it’s not too difficult for a hacker with a continuous random password generator to figure it out relatively quickly.
- Some URLs are not restricted and they should be. In this case, some URLs may contain sensitive information or it may be an easier way to access information that should not be available to the public.
- There is no firewall set up. Even the most basic of firewalls can help prevent hackers from injecting malware and malicious code into your website.
There are many other reasons out there.
Photo by Nahel Abdul Hadi on Unsplash
Common Ways to Hack a Website
According to CobWeb Security, the most common ways to hack a website are:
- Phishing. A hacker may replicate a website similar to yours, however, it’s obviously not your website. There are ways to infiltrate areas where your website may be linked such as emails and website redirects. Someone that is not paying attention to the actual URL may enter their credit card information on the fake version of your website and boom, the hacker has their important information.
- Viruses and malicious code. While there are many types of viruses and malware out there that can do different things, people find ways into your website and inject malicious code scripts to do bad things to your website and its visitors.
- DDoS attacks. A DDoS attack is simply a way to send many requests to the server in the hopes that the server gets overwhelmed and eventually crashes thus bringing your website down.
- SQL injection. Your website may have vulnerabilities in its SQL database, and hackers can access important information by exploiting those SQL databases.
- DNS spoofing. This is where within the domain name system, there may be vulnerabilities that allow hackers to redirect traffic from your website to a malicious website.
Ways to Prevent a Website From Being Hacked
A lot of people will jump into the marketing ads and set up a hosting account in a shared hosting plan because it’s the cheapest, and they will get a website up and running and leave it there. Congratulations. You got a website up and running. You’ve essentially laid a platform for a hacker to discover. Now you need to secure it and ensure your platform is as safe as possible. A great way to not stress about your website’s security and trust that it will be reliable is to be part of Upward Web Agency’s Success Package after we create a website. We take the security of our websites seriously and do our best to make sure they don’t get hacked. They are quick, reliable, and protected with various security methods. To learn more about how your website can be protected, check us out here.