What Is Website Security – Are Online Threats Real?

Your Website is Your 24/7 Shopfront & It’s Vital You Ensure It’s Secure & Works Smoothly

With 80M+ users in more than 200 countries, websites have seen dramatic growth in status and size to become the world’s most indispensable business tool and universal IT resource. These days, you will hardly find someone who isn’t aware of a website. Everyone, such as consumers, likes the convenience it offers and the opportunity to reach a global audience. For merchants, it offers low-cost, high-yield reach to market globally.

In today’s world, Internet users are savvy creatures. For the most part, websites are used not only for shopping but also for important things, such as finding info about your business and whether you’re reliable or not.

Whether you’re in hedge funds or holiday cottages, electrical or e-commerce, your website is one of the important business assets. It’s a 24/7 shop that generates revenue – even when you’re enjoying holidays or shopping in your favorite mall.

But it’s also true that the internet is an open, public network that doesn’t guarantee security, privacy, or integrity. It’s more of a shadow aspect and this is one of the major concerns for large to small businesses.

With the increasing use of technology, there’s an increase in cybercrime as well. From hackers to computer viruses, cybercrime is increasing day by day. Though an array of new security products are always becoming available, website security is still among the grossly neglected aspects of a business.

Imagine you launch a website and done everything to ensure its success, but you didn’t pay heed to the most critical component – security. Guess what? A cyberattack can occur that can cost you a lot and even damage your reputation – discouraging site visitors from coming back.

Fortunately, you can prevent such situations by applying effective website security measures that assure cyberattacks fail to penetrate your website – preventing a leak of critical data, such as your customer’s critical information.

So, if you’re wondering “what is website security?” and want to know more about it, keep on reading!.

What Is Website Security?

Website security can mean different things to different users. For instance, it’s an ability to browse the website with peace, knowing that the site is safe to visit and it doesn’t have any malicious content that can harm or dupe users. However, as a website owner, website security should mean action or proper security measures that ensure the website’s data isn’t exposed to cybercrimes or prevent site exploitation.

In other words, website security is an important component to protect and securing servers and websites. It will help implement security measures using website security software that scans your website for possible malware and vulnerabilities while giving you detailed reports.

For example, website security software like DigiCert Secure Site Pro OV SSL can detect and remove malware, vulnerability scanning and patching, blacklist monitoring, website backup, and much more.

Website Security – Here’s Why You Should Care & Implement

The point of website security is to avoid different types of attacks that lurk on the internet. To be precise, it can prevent unauthorized access, modification, use, disruption, or destruction with the proper website security measures.

Here are some other important reasons to implement proper website security:

• Hosting Providers Are Not Responsible for Protecting Your Website You choose to go with some secure hosting provider, but that doesn’t mean that you should neglect to implement website security protocols. Your hosting provider is accountable for protecting the server on which your site is placed, not the website. So, if your website faces any issue due to a cyberattack, you’ll be held responsible for it unless it happens due to server security issues where your site is hosted.

• Website Security Is Cheaper Compared to Overcoming Cyberattack: From small to big businesses, all who have sites can be targeted to cyberattacks, having a proper security protocol is more beneficial and even cheaper than overcoming cyberattacks and its consequences. It also results in a loss in revenue, reputation, and potential customers.

• Safeguards Your Reputation: Think of it like this, would you want to visit a site that got hacked and you were the victim of that cyberattack? No, you wouldn’t, because you won’t trust that site again. It applies to other users also. Suppose you’ve implemented proper security measures that can tackle cyberattacks- – that will help keep your user’s information safe and in turn your reputation.

• Cyberattacks & Malware Aren’t Easy to Detect: Cybercriminals are getting quite sophisticated, and they are well capable of discretely entering your site and staying hidden for a long duration without being noticed by anyone. So, your website may get infected, and you won’t even know about it until it’s too late. Some advanced malware attacks even include backdoors, which means attackers can access your site without any permission.

• Loss in Site Visitors, Leads & Revenue: Once your site becomes victim to a cyberattack, it gets affected in many ways. For instance, your site visitors will be lowered, which means fewer leads and less revenue. Furthermore, it’ll even negatively affect your SEO ranking. Even after solving the issue, you can’t expect your site ranking to jump back instantly. It’ll take time, which means you will see a long-term drop-in visitors and revenue.

Benefits of Secure Website

Secure websites offer many benefits to users as well as site owners. No doubt, privacy and data protection should be your priority for preventing attacks like identity theft, fraud, and other cybersecurity attacks. However, some benefits from securing your website include:

1. Improved Trust

To keep your site visitors returning to your website, you have to entice them by making sure that your site has taken all the mandatory steps to keep users’ data safe and secure. You should learn and implement things that make your site safe to deal with. Some of the visible security indicators that you should implement include:

• Trust Logos or Trust Seals: Trust seal is the trust badge or secured ‘Lock’ icon that provides visible proof that the site is verified by a respected CA such as Sectigo.

• HTTPS Connection: SSL/TLS certificates are one of the mandatory steps that says a site is safe to deal with, and all the transactions done between user and website will stay encrypted, which is a crucial part of any website. If you fail to implement it, the browser will start showing ‘Not Secure’ and even block your site from being loaded on popular browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

• Privacy Policy: Make sure to keep a proper privacy policy. It’s the content on your website that tells users what data you collect from the site visitors, how it’s used, along with other important information such as do you share any collected data with anyone else or not. It assures users that you’re reliable and safe to deal with. It can also be used as a legal document for both site visitors and website owners.

2. Increased Visitor Engagement

If your site is safe to deal with, operates smoothly, and offers good content, user engagement will likely increase. Furthermore, a secured website also encourages users to stay and do transactions on your site without fear of any security issue.

3. Priority From Google

Google gives priority to secure sites or at least those who have an HTTPS connection. On the other hand, Google also finds a way to penalize those who don’t follow their protocol. For instance, if your site doesn’t have an SSL/TLS certificate installed, Google Chrome will show a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar. And, it’s even possible that your site stops loading all together on popular web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

How to Follow Website Security Policy – What Should I Have?

1. SSL/TLS Certificate

2. Regular Updates

Many security issues arise due to old versions of third-party plugins and applications. It’s best to keep these plugins, extensions, and your CMS updated with all the patches released regularly, because these updates and patches are an updated version. Basically, they resolve any newfound issue, or in other words, it’s like filling a loophole that could make your site open to attacks.

3. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

A WAF (Web Application Firewall) can secure small or less popular websites from common automated attacks using malicious bots, which looks for vulnerabilities or attempts DDoS attacks that crash your website.

4. Website Scanner

A basic step when looking to keep your website safe is to scan your website regularly. A website scanner is a great tool to use as it can detect malware, vulnerabilities, or other security issues before they get exploited and let hackers in.

• Sanitizing user-originating data before it’s shown on the browser using SQL queries or passing it to an operating system.
• Using strong passwords that you change regularly. Considering 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) for your site as well.
• Configuring your site server to HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) and HTTPS.
• Limiting your site on storing user data and not displaying enough data can be identified by anyone—for example, displaying only the last 4 digits of the credit card number.
• Set up a staging site, so before you make anything live, you can test according to your convenience and deal with any issue without affecting the live site.
• If your site deals with the database, it’s recommended to put behind a firewall’s second interface with robust policies.

What is a Not Secure Website – Reasons Why Websites Get Hacked

If you’re wondering what a not secure website is, then the simple answer is the websites that get hacked. Numerous websites are hacked daily, and some are hard to hack, some are easy. Some common reasons why websites get hacked include:

1. Stealing Intellectual Property

Many organizations use websites for storing intellectual property, such as confidential documents of the organization or sales leads. Hacking such websites means a breach of intellectual property, which damages the company’s reputation, leading to a loss in business.

2. Stealing Sensitive Data

Nowadays, many websites deal with users’ sensitive details such as credit card details, login credentials, personally identifiable information, or health records. If the website hasn’t gone through penetration testing and hasn’t taken any security measures, hackers who are after such critical information may try their hand at an attack.

3. Learning Purpose

As the technology advances, hackers also advance in their techniques and methods. Sometimes hackers hack websites without any specific intention – just to test their knowledge, find new loopholes or enhance their hacking skills.

Wrapping Up

In today’s world, having a website is second nature for small to large scale businesses, and dealing with sensitive data through websites and emails are becoming quite normal as well. Hence, threats pertaining to such websites have also increased, and you should not take them lightly.

Nevertheless, website security is an important topic that everyone should be aware of. Here, we’ve discussed some key points like website security, why you shouldn’t take it lightly, the benefits of a secure website, and much more. I hope you put it to good use and stay safe!