One of the most important tasks of Orange County IT services providers is to keep your website safe from hackers. You may not think your website has anything worth being targeted by hackers but websites can be compromised at any given time. Most website security breaches aren’t to steal your data or mess with the layout of your website but instead to attempt to use your server as a relay for spam via email. They may also use it as a temporary web server to send illegal items.
Other common ways to abuse your website include using your servers to mine bitcoins, as part of a botnet and so on. Here are a few ways an IT expert can keep your website safe from hackers.
Keep your software updated
Ensuring you keep your software up to date is very important in keeping your website secure. This includes both the software you are running on your website and the server operating system. When security holes are found in your website software, hackers will attempt to abuse them. If your website is hosted by a paid host, you do not need to worry about doing security updates for your operating system as your hosting company will take care of updates.
On the other hand, if you are using a third-party software program such as a forum or CMS, your IT support should ensure you apply any security patches. A lot of vendors have an RSS feed or mailing list detailing any security issues. Umbraco, WordPress and other CMSes notify you of any updates available when you log into your site.
A lot of developers use tools like npm, Composer, or RubyGems to manage their dependencies on software and any security vulnerabilities appearing in a package that you depend on but are not paying any attention to one of the simplest ways to get caught. You should ensure you keep your dependencies updated.
Beware of error messages
You should be very careful with how much info you give away when you get error messages. You should only provide minimal errors to your users to ensure they do not leak any secrets on your server. Do not provide detailed information as this can encourage attacks. You need to keep detailed errors in your server logs.
Validate on both sides
You should always do validation both on the server and browser side. The browser can catch simple failures such as mandatory fields that are empty and when entering text into a numbers-only field. It is possible to bypass these and you need to ensure you check for these validations as failing to do so could encourage malicious code to be inserted into your database.
Check your passwords
This is one of the first things your Orange County IT services provider should do when you hire them. Everyone knows they need to use complex passwords but that does not mean they always do. You should use strong passwords for your website admin and server. You should also help your users to use good passwords to protect their accounts.
