How to identify and Prevent Common Security Threats to Your Website

It’s good to see when our website is thriving and we have satisfied customers, overall it’s good to see how our brand has become memorable and generating revenue!! Because we have spent a lot of time writing, designing and marketing our website, right?

But what will happen if we lose all our hard work? Or what will happen if we lose important data, suddenly? This could happen at any time! Cyber threats are increasing and therefore owners of the websites need to tackle them. Therefore it is important to identify and understand the threats, and harms is can cause to our website or business and also try to take preventive actions immediately for protecting our data.

In today’s article, we are going to look at some of the common cyber threats and how to prevent them. If you are curious about it, then continue reading it! I guarantee you that you will find this information exciting!!

So let’s first discuss the common threats which can affect our website:

A first common threat is Ransomware:

Ransomware is a nasty piece of software that is designed in such a way that it restricts access to your website and you will get access to your website only when some ransom amount is paid to the hacker or attacker. According to a study, around 45% of the small-medium businesses have faced such incidences in the past few months. The study also indicates that at every 30 to 40 seconds ransomware attacks a business.

Whenever any of you face such a situation, your complete website can be shut down or taken offline for a short period of time. It might happen that even if you pay the ransom amount, still your website can remain deactivated.

And you might also know the effect of website downtime on yourself and also on your business is quiet worth taken care of. Just think the correct amount to your business if your website is offline due to ransomware.

For example: Assume some amount which you pay as a ransom to the attacker, then the loss occurred to your sales, loss occurred to your employees, future loss of sales because of damage to your brand reputation, and effect on SEO ranking of your website because of blacklisting, etc.

Second type of threat is because of Malware:

Malware is damaging software that is expected to harm your website and your machine. According to studies around 35,000 websites get affected or hacked every day and around 72% of data breaches take place in online businesses.

Google blacklist’s around thousands of websites per week because of malware. One more impact of malware is that when any search engine finds out that your website has been attacked by malware, and then they display warning message saying “This site may harm your system” and because of this warning, your potential customers can avoid visiting your website or may also avoid doing transactions with your website.

Thus this might result in a loss in revenue or if your website gets blacklisted then it may harm the reputation of your brand.

The third type of threat is Unexpected Deletion of an important file:

Sometimes a website can be taken down or taken offline just because of the human error. We, people, make mistakes and it might happen that any employee of your business may accidentally delete an important file or may delete some important database, which might lead to website failure.

Another type of Threat is from Phishing:

In phishing, fake emails are sent, which is considered as an illegal practice, on account of actual companies to the people, so as to trick the people and get their personal information like passwords, or credit card/ debit card numbers, etc. Studies have found that around 20% of entire emails are hacked every year.

Nowadays a trending phishing attack is through a user clicking fake links to social media thus company emails or website emails are not the only medium responsible for causing damage through phishing.

The fifth type of threat is from Security Breaches:

Security breaches can take place at any time. During security breach, attackers invade your application or server and most of the time they stole sensitive information of your customers like a contact number or email address or security details, etc. One of the biggest security breaches had happened in 2016 at Yahoo when around 1 billion accounts of the users were compromised.

One more type of threat that can occur due to unsatisfied employee sabotaging your business:

Presently unsatisfied employees are highly sabotaging businesses all over the world and the next target could be you. With the help of an old username and password, a disgruntled employee may take your website offline or may steal sensitive information related to your business or company or organization.

If the ex-employee of your business is still able to access your business applications for some period of time even after his departure, then your complete website could be prone to sabotage.

Next type of threat could arise from a DDoS attack:

Such a type of threat is referred to as Distributed-Deniel-of-Sevice (DDoS). In this type of threat, the attackers target a website by flooding the bandwidth or traffic and which then results in preventing the real or genuine traffic from viewing any type of website.

In the past large online companies had been attacked by DDoS attacks like Netflix, PayPal, etc.

Up to here, we saw various cyber threats that can drastically affect your website or business.

In the next section we are going to discuss how to prevent them from letting your website down:

Use advanced security policies & carry out awareness training:

As mentioned earlier, cyber threats are increasing consistently, so it is important for businesses to redesign their security policies, carry out awareness training and start auditing to make sure that your employees are following the company’s guidelines.

While designing the policies, keep in mind how does your business works. You can decrease the risk of damage due to these threats to your business by implementing properly designed security policies, backup policies within your company.

Your company’s security policies should include Emails, websites, equipment, databases and at the same time computer systems or machines also. Unless and until your employees are aware of these policies, regulations will not be effective i.e. you should engage your employees in awareness training regarding your company’s rules and regulations, areas prone to risks and also how to prevent such threats and how to effectively manage company data.

Protect your data:

First of all try to prevent attackers from reaching out to the server on which your website is being hosted or reaching out to your website’s database or folders, by using popular antivirus software. You can install anti-DDoS software, load balancing, etc. for protecting your website and your business from cyber threats.

It is most important to take a backup of your data:

It is a very good practice to take backups of your website’s data and save it on your personal system. Backup of your website contains all the important information regarding your websites like files, folders, databases, add-ons, plugins or themes or extensions or modules, etc.

While taking backups of your website you can use end to end encryption or you can use SSL certificates. It is easy to recover all of your websites backed up data.

Conclusion:

Try to avoid mistakes because attackers or hackers may be targeting your website and may want to damage your business so that they can get profit as it is a matter of when any attack will take place on your website.

Such threats will result in financial loss, stealing of data or loss of property, or damage to your reputation and your visitors may stop trusting your brand. The impact is high and at the same time securing your website from such threats is also difficult but you should be ready for this. You can use any of the above mentioned preventive measures and never forget to backup your website. This is what smart businesses do and that’s why they stay one step ahead of their competitors.

I hope you find this information useful. Please do not forget to leave a comment in the comment section below. Thank you for reading the blog.