Holding Down Your Cyber Fort: Seven Truths About Website Security

by Jess Camacho, Guest Contributor

The most important thing about the Information Age is information itself, which is critically vulnerable as it flows around freely in the web. If you’re running a digital marketing company, your customers’ information is the lifeblood of your business, and its security is of paramount importance.

Here are Seven Truths About Website Security that can help you hold down your digital marketing company’s cyber fort:

Hackers Can and Will
You’re right in thinking that hackers don’t care about your website, but they do care about the havoc that they can wreak onto it just because they can. Hackers use bots just like search engines to search the web for any vulnerability that they can use to disrupt your website’s activity. Once they get in, they can ruin you by gaining access to private information like account credentials and using them for dirty schemes. They can even clone your website and redirect your visitors to a very bad place on the web. No digital marketing company website— or any website for that matter— is too obscure to be hacked.

Updates Don’t Clean Out Everything
Black hats are constantly and patiently in search of new ways to break in, and when they do, they create “back doors.” This is how they get in after you updated your website and eliminated any weakness. Running a security scan and code audit is the only way to find and remove back doors. Comparing your CMS code to the original code greatly helps.

Protection is Better than a Fix
A proper source code repository and backup system are vital in ensuring website security, especially for a start-up digital marketing company. Using a source code repository like GIT or SVN with daily, weekly, and monthly backups is a good place to start. Fixing break-ins are a lot more expensive than getting proper protection for your website, so you might want to make investments in a good website security.

SSL is Not Secure Enough
The Secure Socket Layer is a solid security protocol that encrypts information that flows from server to browser. It’s adequate informational protection, but it won’t stop the exploitation of other vulnerabilities your website might have.

Backup is a Fallback, Not a Fortress
In the wake of an attack, backups can help you restore your website but not reverse the damages already done such as stolen sensitive data and phishing attacks on your visitors. A backup is essentially an identical, reserved copy of your website’s image, which means it has the same exact weaknesses. If your website’s been hacked once, there’s a chance it would get attacked again if you restore it with your backup without actually fixing security defects. Backup is good but not a viable substitute for iron-clad security for your digital marketing company’s website.
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The Intranet is Not Safe
If your digital marketing company uses an internal network to conduct business, good for you as you have the power to control it. What you do not completely control, however, is the intention of those who have access to your internal network. Disgruntled, tech-savvy employees scraping valuable information off their employer’s intranet is not unheard of, and those who are neither disgruntled nor tech-savvy get victimized by social engineering attacks. Well-placed website security is very important regardless of the kind of network you’re using.

WAFs are Band-aids, Not Solutions
Web application firewalls or WAFs help diminish specific attacks such as taking advantage of cross site scripting and SQL injection vulnerabilities but, otherwise, leave you susceptible to other forms of attack. It only adds a fresh layer of security but does not necessarily eradicate the underlying problem. There are a lot of ways WAFs can be bypassed and having tons of it does not compensate for actually fixing security flaws.

The main thing you take care of in any business is your customers. As a business owner, a website with properly placed security protocols is your way of telling your customers that you care about their safety.

​Jess Camacho is part of Marketing team of ConvertBetter and she has a good grasp of all the essentials of building and promoting a website. Her skills and knowledge in her field makes her prominent in the company.