How to Secure and Protect a Website from Hackers?

Is there anything more frightening for a website owner than the idea that a malicious hacker may change all they’ve done or perhaps delete it all?

News stories frequently report on data breaches and hackers. You might be asking why someone would target my website for a small business. However, not just the big organizations are vulnerable to hacking.

According to one research, 43% of all data breaches reportedly included small enterprises.

You’ve put a lot of effort into developing your website (and your brand), so it’s essential to take the time to secure it using these fundamental hacker security strategies.

So, let’s explore what measures must be taken to protect against website hacking.  

Why Do Websites Get Hacked?

According to the most recent State of Application Security Report for Q1 2023, there has been a substantial increase in the threats to website security.

AppTrana WAAP stopped one billion attacks against more than 1400 websites.

Every website is vulnerable, whether it’s a static e-commerce platform, a dynamic blog, a portfolio showcase, a little cupcake shop, or something else entirely.

Websites are continuously being scanned by crawlers and snoopers looking for weaknesses they can exploit to get access and carry out their objectives. Many website hackers are motivated by financial gain, but several other factors are also at play. The Hacker’s Objectives are listed below:

Economic Benefits

According to data, 86% of people are driven by money! Even websites belonging to small, local companies can be compromised by hackers to earn substantial quantities of money.

In what way?

Misuse of Data

Malware, brute force attacks, phishing, and social engineering attacks, among other methods, could be used by hackers to acquire sensitive user data.

They might commit financial fraud, identity theft, impersonation, and other crimes using stolen data, such as transferring money from the users’ bank accounts, applying for loans using the credentials they obtained, collecting government benefits, setting up fraudulent social media profiles, etc.

Malware Distribution

Hackers frequently target websites to infect users with malware, such as spyware and ransomware. They could be disseminating malware for other cybercriminals, rivals, or even nation-states for their gain (such as extorting money from businesses, selling their patents, etc.). They both generate significant incomes.

Information Selling on the Dark Web

Hackers may generate enormous amounts of money by selling user or company data on the dark web since data is the new oil. Cybercriminals acquire and use stolen data to prepare for fraud, identity theft, financial fraud, and other crimes. Such data is bought by fraudsters who use it to create customized phishing emails or highly targeted ad fraud.

Free Advertising

Your website could be hacked for advertising if it gets a lot of visitors. One possibility is to change the website so that it begins to display advertisements for a service that the hacker is connected to. Another alternative is to reroute all traffic. You may create a redirect so that whenever someone visits your website, they are immediately sent to the hacker’s website.

Fun

Hackers can do it just for fun. Many well-known cyberattacks have been carried out only to test the attackers’ abilities. So, a hacker could try to access your website only to test if they can. Another shared drive is bragging rights. The only goal of a hacker can be to show their friends that they oversee your website.

Services Disruption 

Attackers can try to make a website inoperable or unavailable to authorized users through website hacking. The finest illustration of an attacker disrupting services is a DDoS attack. Hackers can use this to cover other criminal operations (such as data theft, website modification, vandalism, money extortion, etc.), take down the website, or divert visitors to spam or competing websites.

Hacktivism

Hackers occasionally need more monetary motivation. Whether social, economic, political, religious, or ethical, they only want to make a point. They use ransomware, DDoS attacks, website defacements, the disclosure of private information, etc.

State-Sponsored Attacks

Nation-states frequently employ hackers to plan political intelligence or cyberwarfare against competing nation-states, political rivals, etc. Web hacking is employed for various purposes, including stealing sensitive data, inciting political unrest, and influencing elections.

Poor or Inadequate Access Controls 

A website’s servers, hosting control panel, social networking forums, networks, and connections all fall under the umbrella of access control, which also covers user privileges, authorization, and authentication.

You can choose who has access to your website, its many parts, data, and assets, and how much power and privilege they are allowed using access control. Brute-force attacks are a standard tactic hackers use to get around authentication and permission.

These techniques include guessing passwords and usernames, using widely applicable password combinations, password generation tools, and phishing or social engineering emails and links.

Reasons Why Website Security Is Important

To protect your company’s reputation, brand, and website, as well as to guard against financial loss and website closure, your website must be secure. By maintaining customers and visitors, you can safeguard your website’s reputation.

Malware and cyberattacks will be hard to spot. Cybercriminals specialize in malware that can penetrate a website covertly and remain undetected so that your website does not become infected, and you might not even be aware of it.

The leading causes of such attacks include backdoors, software that enables hackers to access a website without the owner’s knowledge, and crypto-jacking, which silently mines websites for bitcoins.

Some of the Most Typical Risk Categories that Arise from Insufficient Website Security are:

Malware: 

It is software that has been developed specifically with the intention of damaging a computer system or enabling unauthorized access.

Exploiting Vulnerabilities: 

By employing an out-of-date plugin, hackers can access your website and the data about your company that is stored there.

Blocklisting: 

If search engines identify any malware on your website, it will be marked with a warning notice that prompts users to leave the page, and your website may be taken from the search engine results page.

Vandalism: 

A website attack of this type modifies the website’s or webpages outside look.

Exposed Sensitive Data:

Hackers employ software to transmit sensitive information through sessions, poor code, and URLs, increasing the possibility of a website’s vulnerability.

Buffer Overflow: 

The vulnerability in the targeted application is caused when nearby memory regions of the software are overwritten with data. This overwriting could be used to introduce malicious code into the memory of the targeted software.

Security Measures and Best Practices to Protect Website

The website’s security is proactively handled using the following security measures/best practices, protecting your website and users, and resulting in more significant income and growth.

SSL Certificates:

SSL certificates secure the data your website collects while it is transferred from your site to a server, including emails, identifications, user information, credit card information, etc.

Software Updates:

Due to vulnerabilities and security issues frequently identified in third-party plugins and apps, websites based on content management systems (CMS) are more vulnerable to compromise. Updates to core software and plugins should be performed promptly to protect these.

WAF:

“Web application firewall” thwarts robotic attacks that frequently target smaller or less well-known websites.

SQL Injection: 

Data breaches happen when SQL injection gives outsiders access to company information and insights. Hackers will have access to the database using SQL injection, giving them the capacity to add, remove, or change data there. It is, therefore, preferable to prevent SQL injection from triggering website security issues.

Security Scanner for Websites:

For proper mitigation, a website scanner searches for vulnerabilities, malware, and other security issues.

Using HTTPS to Secure your Website: 

An internet communication protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) secures the integrity and confidentiality of data sent between a user’s computer and a website.

Using the Transport Layer Security protocol, data transferred through HTTPS is secured on three different levels:

• Secure encryption: Data transmissions are encrypted to prevent malicious parties from reading them.
• Data integrity: It prevents data from being altered or distorted during transfer, intentionally or accidentally, without being noticed.
• Authentication: It prevents attacks and increases user trust, which positively impacts various business outcomes.

Firewalls for Web Apps: 

By acting as a secure online gateway and guarding against attacks like cross-site scripting, file inclusion, SQL injection, and other types of attacks, it provides you control over the internet traffic and user behavior.

Few Easy Methods to Protect Your Website Against Hackers

Use Plugins for Website Security

It’s crucial to take measures to protect your website from potential security risks if you run one.

One approach is Using website security plugins to assist in securing your site and defend it from different threats. It’s crucial to pick the best website security plugin for your needs out of the numerous options accessible.

We recommend contacting a site security specialist for guidance if you need help deciding which plugin to use.

In the interim, the following qualities should be included in a website security plugin:

It must work with your website’s platform.

Protection against common risks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting should be provided.

It should be well-known and updated often. It should also be simple to install and use.

You can ensure that a high-quality product protects your website by considering these aspects.

Make Use of Multi-factor Authentication and Strong Passwords

For your online accounts, using multi-factor authentication and secure passwords is essential.

This is why: A challenging password to crack is strong. It must contain uppercase and lowercase numbers, letters, and symbols and be at least eight characters long. A secure password management tool is the easiest way to create strong passwords.

A further degree of protection that can be added to your online accounts is multi-factor authentication (MFA). When logging in, MFA requires the usage of two or more factors to confirm your identity.

For instance, a one-time code that is communicated to your phone and your password might be used.

MFA for your accounts can shield you from hackers who might have access to your password. Even if they know your password, they need access to your phone to log in.

Have Accurate Data Backups

For your computer, it’s crucial to maintain reliable data backups. If your files are lost or corrupted, you can utilize your data backup to restore your files.

Pick the data backup strategy that works best for you out of the various options available.

A plugin that will generate backups for you must be downloaded. Some website platforms have tools that accomplish this automatically, while others require configuration.

Whatever approach you choose, it’s crucial to have several backups in case one of them fails. Your backups should also be kept in a private and secure location, such as a fireproof safe or a security deposit box.

Utilize HTTPS

As a user, you could be aware that before entering sensitive information on a website, you should always look for the green lock icon and HTTPS in your browser bar. These five little characters serve as a crucial shorthand for hacker security, indicating that entering personal or financial information on a given website is okay.

Because an SSL certificate encrypts data transfers, particularly those involving credit cards, personal data, and contact information, between your website and the server, it is significant.

Although eCommerce websites have always required an SSL certificate, all websites now need to have one as well. Google launched a new version of Chrome in 2018. If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate setup, the security update from July warns website visitors. Even if your website doesn’t gather essential data, this increases the chance that visitors will leave immediately.

Because they want consumers to have a great and secure web experience, search engines are now more concerned than ever with website security. A search engine could rank your website poorly in search results if you don’t have an SSL certificate, taking the commitment to security a step further.

For you, what does that mean? You must invest in Trusted SSL certificates if you want people to trust your brand. An SSL certificate is inexpensive, but the additional degree of encryption it provides to your consumers makes your website more reliable and secure.

Although we at Certera take website security meticulously, our top priority is to make it simple for you to stay safe.

– An affordable SSL Certificate Starts at $3.99 Per Year!

Understand the Requirements and Recommended Practices for PCI-DSS. 

The data security standard used by the payment card industry is called PCI-DSS. To prevent disclosing their customers’ payment information and incurring responsibility, any organization that accepts card payments must abide by the rules.

Any payment platform, processor, or gateway you utilize to accept payments on your website must be PCI-DSS compliant, which minimizes the measures you must take to protect payment information.

The PCI Security Standards Council’s free materials are helpful, but you must know the fundamental standards. The Data Security Essentials Evaluation Tool for merchants could show you where your security is strong and where it might be more robust, making it an intelligent place to start.

Give Contributors Required and Minimal Access

If your website expands and you start to include other authors, like a guest author or a freelance web developer.

It’s critical to restrict each contributor’s access.

By doing this, you’ll be able to maintain the organization of your website and prevent contributors from mistakenly removing or changing critical files.

Depending on what task you want the user to have, most systems let you choose a different role.

Use this to ensure users only have access to the resources they require doing their jobs and nothing more.

Purchase Website Security Tools

When you believe you have done all possible, it’s time to assess the security of your website. Utilizing some website security technologies, often known as penetration or pen testing for short, is the most efficient approach.

There are several paid and unpaid items available that can assist you with this. They operate similarly to script hackers in that they test every known weakness and try to infiltrate your website utilizing some techniques outlined before, such as SQL Injection.

Here are some excellent examples of free tools:

Netsparker (available in both a free community edition and a trial version). Excellent for testing XSS and SQL injection

SecurityHeaders.io (free online check). A tool that can rapidly report whether of the security above headers—like CSP and HSTS—a domain has enabled and is correctly configured for.

OpenVAS is the most cutting-edge open-source security scanner, according to its claims. Currently scans over 25,000, beneficial for testing known vulnerabilities.

However, it’s challenging to set up and must have an OpenVAS server installed, which is only compatible with *nix. Before Nessus became a closed-source commercial product, it was forked into OpenVAS.

Secure Your Website from Cyber Criminals

Long-term site security and health rely significantly on on-site security and understanding how to protect against hackers. Consider taking these necessary measures early.

To help protect your website, Certera offers a selection of SSL certificates and cyber security services and solutions. We can make sure you’re secure!

FAQ’s

Can SSL or an HTTPS Website Be Hacked?

Thus, to answer the query, “Is it possible to hack an SSL certificate?” Although it’s doubtful, the answer is yes. Your SSL certificate should be secure if it utilizes the most recent TLS protocol, version 1. 3, which is what SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates do.

Why Does Your Website Need HTTPS?

When using HTTPS, data is secured in transit to and from the origin server in both directions. The protocol ensures that conversations are secure by preventing unauthorized individuals from seeing the transferred data. As a result, when users enter usernames and passwords into forms, they cannot be stolen while in transit.

How do I know if My Site has been Hacked?

The signs of a hack could be highly varied. Your website could have been hacked if you receive a troubling security alert from Google, a browser warning when you access it, or even a message from your hosting company saying they’ve taken it down.

How does HTTPS Protect you (and how doesn’t it?)

The DNS resolution and connection setup can expose more information, such as the whole domain or subdomain and the originating IP address. HTTPS encrypts the entire HTTP request and response, but extra information can be revealed. Hackers can also search for “side channel” content through encrypted HTTPS traffic.

How can Websites become More Secure?

• Install security tools.

• Install an SSL certificate.
• Update your website often.
• Use secure passwords.
• Back up your website frequently.
• Train your employees.
• Scan constantly.
• Implement security technologies.