Your website is the online face of your company. It is a salesman who never tires. It is a customer service representative on-call 24 hours a day. It is a business promoting, generating, and processing powerhouse.
So knowing that keeping your website up and running is imperative, how can you protect this valuable resource and make sure your clients are never disappointed?
The 5 Most Common Website Threats
Ransomware & Malware
Forty-two percent of SMBs have been adversely affected by ransomware, a type of insidious software designed to block access to your website until “ransom” money is paid to the attacker. (Source: Kaspersky Labs) These incidents are on the rise and if you are a victim, your entire website could be taken offline for a short time, or remain permanently disabled.
Similarly, malware is software that is intended to intentionally damage your systems and website. If a search engine such as Google detects malware on your website, your visitors might see a warning saying “This site may harm your computer” and your customers could even be blocked from visiting or doing business on your website.
Are You At Risk? According to Verizon Enterprise, 71% of the 30,000 malware attacks which occur daily happen to businesses with less than 100 employees.
Phishing
Phishing is the practice of sending fake emails on behalf of real companies in an attempt to trick people into revealing sensitive or confidential information.
The emails look legitimate and appear to be from the actual company. (An email may arrive appearing to be from a bank, asking for verification of user name and password). Hackers can then use the information obtained to compromise accounts, or entire website systems.
While emails and text messages have been the most common avenue for phishing attacks, increasingly fake social media accounts and links are now wreaking havoc.
Data Breaches
Data breaches can happen anytime company servers have been compromised. Private customer data such as phone numbers, home addresses, credit card information and social security numbers are stolen and end up in the hands of criminals.
Large data breaches such as at Yahoo!, Target & Equifax have been in the news in recent years. Unfortunately, sometimes this sabotage can be an inside job, as the lure of making money can sometimes influence an employee to use their secure access for nefarious purposes.
User Error
Not all downtime is criminal or shady. Although less likely with today’s environments, user error still may be a factor in taking a website offline.
For instance, accidentally deleting a critical file may cause a system to crash until it can be restored.
Although perfectly innocent, it can be just as devastating in the repercussions. Downtime may also be caused by a failure of an improperly setup system – overloading a server, not having proper data and power protections, and operating without redundancy can all cause a site to go offline unexpectedly.
Traffic Jams
When a website experiences an unexpected large surge of traffic, it can be in danger of crashing and going offline. Even if it stays online, if a server gets too busy, it may not be able to respond to user requests in a timely manner.
This could cause timeouts and processes slowed to crawl, frustrating clients and threatening revenue. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are caused by bots flooding the bandwidth of a targeted website server, which can prevent legitimate traffic from viewing the site.
But other more positive scenarios are possible as well – in an age of viral videos, sharing and social media, if the right person talks about your product or service, you may find yourself flooded with hundreds or thousands of users you did not have yesterday.
How Do I Protect Our Company?
If a website is so important yet so vulnerable, you may think it impossible to keep it up and running safely. Although no one can plan for every contingency – new situations arise every day – there are some simple proactive steps you can take to greatly decrease your chances either of becoming a victim, or of suffering needlessly because of user error or being unprepared.
Restructure Your Business Policies – Have security officers review risks and vulnerabilities, encompassing all systems, electronic messages, websites, databases, equipment, and facilities.
Create security procedures to be implemented across the organization, and provide comprehensive procedural training to employees. Consider restricting access for employees only to those pieces of data they will need to perform their specific function.
Keep the Bad Guys Guessing – It is commonly recognized that anti-virus or anti-malware software and firewalls may no longer suffice as standalone solutions, but they are good first step. After that is in place, make sure that all security updates to software and operating systems are installed promptly.
Consider load sharing across multiple servers, which allows you to divert traffic away from an affected server and minimizes damage should one server be compromised.
Back it Up – The oldest warning is still as relevant today as it ever was. Businesses must perform regular website data backups; whether the system in on-site, such as a server or hard drive; or if the data resides in the cloud. These backups provide a snapshot of all your website’s critical content files, code folders, website databases and add-ons, plugins, or themes.
Having the backup will allow you to retrieve and recover most of your data no matter the circumstance, getting your website back online far more quickly.
Trust the Professionals – You are an expert at what you do, and you pride yourself on keeping up with all the latest innovations and processes in your industry. But you can’t be expected to also keep up with how to handle all the latest security threats and vulnerabilities – even something as simple as a power surge from a Sarasota summer storm. Managed IT Support services are designed by professionals who are adept at keeping your systems up, running, redundant and secure at all times.
At Alliance IT, we are the best at what we do – so you can be free to be the best at what you do.
