Methods to Protect your Website from Malicious Intent April 17, 2021 htshosting Post in Web Security Protecting your website from hackers is very complicated but is also very necessary task. There are many factors that impact cybersecurity and ignoring may cause devastating consequences. But fortunately, there are several steps you can take to protect your website from cyber threats. What possibilities makes your website more vulnerable? Some of the most common possibilities are: – Brute force attacks – Hackers uses different tools and bots to test random login credentials. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) – Large amount of data packets are send to target IP address to cause high web-traffic that consumers memory of web server. SQL injection – Small scripts are used to retrieve sensitive information from your website database. Malware – Poor usage of code can lead to infect your user’s web browsers and computer and this can even steal or compromise your website security. Additionally, shared hosting sometimes can cause huge security concerns. In shared hosting, if one website was compromised. Then there is possibility that other websites might be at risk. That’s why many business organizations prefer to choose VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. Methods to protect your website from malicious intent: – Enable Two-factor authentication to thwart brute force attacks – Hackers tries to brute force attacks website administrative account. This can give them complete access to the back-end of your website. They wreak havoc in variety of forms that includes hiding malware, stealing data and destroying content. The best way to stop brute force attacks is to implement 2FA on your website. In two-factor authentication user needs to identify in different ways before granting them access to your website. Each user has username and password but they have to authenticate themselves by using 2FA. 2FA consists of: – Text message containing code that user have to enter on your website. An email containing a code that user have to enter on your website. And the application will send push notification asking user to confirm their login attempt. 2FA is configured on every login attempts and for unfamiliar IP addresses. Either hackers require valid login credentials and their smartphone to enter into their website. There are number of ways to implement 2FA on CMS (Content Management System). You may want to set up 2FA for your hosting account. Hosting account lots of information such as – billing information and details. Protection against SQL injection with Web Application Firewall (WAF) – SQL injection occurs when malicious code is entered into input forms. Input forms include – login page, contact form, comments section of your website. When the form is submitted, databases processes the input. This is very simple for hackers to run malicious code to your database. In some scenarios, it returns sensitive data as per the hacker wants. While in other cases it may destroy your database security. Avoid showing detailed error messages – Detail error messages are helpful in troubleshooting on your website. If you are showing detailed error message. Hackers can exploit and then gain access to your website. For example – If they are showing simple reads such as – “File Not Found” attacker doesn’t have additional information. But if they see “Access Denied”. It clearly shows that they have found the file’s location and need to break only the webpage authentication. And they could even trigger other error messages to learn about website directory structure. Conclusion: – Above steps will be really helpful for your website. Thus, it might not fully secure your website but will keep your website away from hackers. Security is also an responsibility of hosting provider. That’s why connect with HTS Hosting, top cloud hosting company providing Self Managed Linux VPS Hosting, Self Managed Windows VPS Servers hosting and other hosting plans.