How to Prevent Common Website Security Threats

Most business owners, in order to make their companies more reachable to the masses, have websites these days. A website is the fastest way to reach your customers. They can find all the information about your business there, including your contact details. While the owners put considerable time and effort to build a good looking website that their visitors would like, one area where they don’t always seem to give enough attention is to keep their websites secure.

Most website security threats have the capability of partially or completely destroying your website. Hence, one must take the necessary preventive measures to maintain website security!

Now, let us discuss the most common website security threats and ways to prevent them from harming your websites!

1.Injection Flaws

Injection flaws occur because of not filtering unreliable material. These issues crop up when you are passing unmodified data to the browser and to other servers (SQL injection, LDAP injection, HTML injection etc.). By letting injection flaws into your website, you are in a way allowing the hacker to hijack your website.

How to prevent injection flaws:

Injection flaws can easily be prevented by filtering your data. But, you have to be careful to filter all of your input and not leave anything without modification. The best way to do this is by using frameworks to sanitize the data. Frameworks play an important role in maintaining your website security.

2.Cross Site Scripting

Cross Site Scripting is one of the most prevalent website security threats. It is a kind of injection, whereby unreliable data is injected into even the most dependable websites. It takes place when a hacker sends a corrupt code to a user. This can be something as simple as just creating a link and convincing the users to click/tap on it.

How to prevent Cross Site Scripting:

There are a number of ways of preventing Cross Site Scripting. Firstly, one can check if the input data is secure before it goes to the end user. This method is known as escaping user data. Secondly, one can validate the input rendered by any application through whitelisting as well as blacklisting. Thirdly, one needs to see to it that the user data is completely sanitized.

3. Not keeping security settings updated

Not keeping one’s security settings updated is like inviting the hackers to attack the website. One has to be extremely alert to always remember to update the security settings. You cannot just wait for a month to update your website anymore because bots are constantly trying to find that weak-spot in your system.

How to prevent this situation:

This can easily be prevented by personalizing one’s password and other authentications. One should also be cautious to not let useless services run on the system. Also, outdated software should be avoided. Installing SSL certificates is a good idea as well.

4. Exposing sensitive information

What is basically meant by sensitive information is data that needs to be kept secret such as the users’ credit card numbers, passwords etc. Sensitive information is supposed to be encrypted every time so that they do not fall into wrong hands.

How to prevent this:

This can be prevented by encrypting all the data. SSL certificates must be installed into the system, as they are the need of the hour. Always choose an HTTPS connection over an HTTP one. HTTPS comes with a lock in the URL which shows that the website is protected. Also, do not try to save your sensitive data anywhere, but if you really need it, make sure that it is stored after encryption.

5. Hacking password

Hacking the passwords of your users is a major website security threats. The hackers either try to do it by trying some easy combinations of letters and words or by tracking the users’ keystrokes. Once they get to know the passwords of your users, they can easily pretend to be them and log in into their accounts.

How to prevent this:

You can prevent this by following a few steps. While saving your users’ password for the first time, ask them to use a strong combination of characters. Secondly, always remind them to change their passwords after a certain period of time. Two-step authentication is also a good way to keep their accounts secure.

6. Malware

In simple words, Malware means some software or application intentionally created to destroy computer systems. From acquiring all your sensitive information to accessing the available resources on your system, Malware can wreak havoc into your computers. With the internet becoming an important part of our lives over the years, there has been a huge growth in malware as well.

How to prevent malware:

You can prevent malware in a number of ways. Firstly, you can have anti-malware software installed into your system to detect viruses and destroy them. Always remember to update firewall after installing it into your computer. Spam filters are available on most email services, which block the spam emails from entering your inbox. Timely updates and security scans also play important roles in preventing malware.

7. Broken Authentication and Session Management

As a user logs in to a certain website to purchase something, that website assigns a session ID to the user, which is a way to identify him/her. In case of broken authentication, a hacker breaks into that session and takes up the identity of the user.

How to prevent this:

Using an SSL certificate is a good way to prevent broken authentication. SSL certificates encrypt the information sent and received during an active session, thus not allowing the hacker to read into it. Using VPN, Firewalls, and tough-to-guess passwords can also help in protecting user data.