A Comprehensive Guide for Website Security

It’s great that you have upgraded your internet package after reviewing the Spectrum internet plans. Maybe you should pay attention to improving the security of your website also in case you haven’t. Experts have predicted that by 2019, business websites will become a victim of ransomware attacks at the rate of 1 site every 14 seconds. These attacks are growing in size every year. Before you even know it, your site could be affected, too.

Follow this guide to enhance website security:

Check Your Passwords

Each one of us is well aware that we are supposed to use complex passwords. Unfortunately, we don’t comply with it. Using a minimum of 8 characters, numbers, and uppercase letters will help you protect your information big time.

That’s not all, you are supposed to store your passwords as encrypted values. For that, you can use a one-way hashing also like SHA. It lets you authenticate users by comparing encrypted values.

Keep The Software Up To Date

This one is obvious, too, but it’s extremely pertinent to the security of your website. You must keep both the operating system and any software you are running on your website up to date. Hackers abuse the security holes in the software and eventually hack a website.

In case you are using managed hosting, you don’t have to worry about applying security updates on your operating system as the hosting company will take care of that on its own.

Watch Out For The Error Messages

You will often come across error messages. Be careful with how much information you give away when they appear. Let users handle limited errors only. This will ensure they don’t leak information located on your server such as database passwords or API keys.

Create A Backup Of Your Website Regularly

Creating a regular backup is curial. In case anything happens, you won’t have to build the entire website from scratch. Follow this as a ritual. You can also set up automatic backups. It makes creating backup effortless along with the process of restoring your site.

Use A Malware Detector

Regardless of its type, any website has an open risk of getting infected with malware. The worse thing is that apart from destroying your website, it can also infect the computer of your customers. The best way to avoid both these scenarios is to use a strong malware detector. These programs have the ability to spot malware and get rid of it before it does significant damage.

Malware detector or anti-malware program is relatively inexpensive compared to the loss a malware can make you bear.

Set Up An SSL Certificate

Having an SSL certificate is especially necessary if you have an e-commerce website. Before handing over sensitive information, your customers need to be sure the website they want to do business with is secure. An SSL certificate provides them this security.

It shows a green HTTPS in the bar of the web browser indicating that the website in use is trusted. But that’s not the only reason why you should be using one. It adds an extra layer of protection to your website ensuring that the customer information you have is encrypted and it cannot be accessed by cybercriminals.

Follow The Least Privileged Principle

If you are using a WordPress website, you can resonate with it. There are 6 types of user roles – administrator, author, editor, contributor, super admin, and subscriber. You need to be careful when allotting these rules. Each role has its own set of powers. The administrator is at the top of this hierarchy as he has full control over the website. He has the authority to manage which rights should be given to people and which not. Make sure when distributing the authority, you are confident that the ones who have power won’t abuse it.

Run Regular Security Checks

With a thorough security check, you can easily identify potential issues with your site. You must run a test on your website at least once a week. There are certain programs that let you perform security checks. They generate a report that shows a list of vulnerabilities on your website. Start by fixing the most harmful issue.

Final Words

Hackers are constantly ambushing and upcoming up with new ways to get around the protections used by people. You must keep on revising your security best practices to keep your website secure. Otherwise, you are at the risk of not just losing precious data but also customers just like Spectrum customer service number because of service downtime.

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