Are Cyber Criminals Targeting Your Website? Here’s the Ultimate Guide to Bulletproofing Your Site in 2019!

In 2019, cyber attacks have become more prevalent than ever before. Every day, businesses face a barrage of hacking attempts, data breaches, and other malicious attacks from cyber criminals. If you’re a website owner, chances are that your site is also at risk of being targeted by cyber criminals. To ensure that your website is protected against these threats, it’s important to take a proactive approach towards cybersecurity. In this guide, we’ll discuss some of the best practices that you can follow to bulletproof your site in 2019 and beyond.

Use HTTPS throughout your site

The first step towards securing your website is to enforce HTTPS, which is a secure version of the standard HTTP used for web communication. This means that all communications between your website and its visitors are encrypted and secure. To enforce HTTPS, you need to obtain an SSL certificate from a trusted provider like Let’s Encrypt, which will ensure that your website is authenticated and encrypted to protect against cyber attacks.

Keep your software up-to-date

One of the most common ways that cyber criminals exploit websites is by exploiting vulnerabilities in software. It’s therefore very important to keep all software up-to-date, including your website’s content management system (CMS), plugins, themes, and all other software that your website uses. By keeping your software up-to-date, you’ll ensure that any known vulnerabilities or bugs are patched, making it much harder for a cyber criminal to exploit your website.

Enable two-factor authentication (2FA)

Another way to protect your website is to use two-factor authentication (2FA), which provides an additional layer of security against unauthorized access. With 2FA, users are required to provide two forms of authentication before they can access your website. This could be a password and a security token, a password and a fingerprint, or any other combination of authentication methods.

Use strong passwords and change them frequently

Passwords are the first line of defense for your website, so it’s very important to use strong passwords and change them frequently. A strong password should consist of a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Ideally, passwords should also be at least 12 characters long. Additionally, it’s a good idea to use a password manager, which will help you generate and store strong passwords.

Take regular backups of your website

Regularly backing up your website is another important step towards bulletproofing your site. If your website is compromised or hacked, you can restore your website from a recent backup, which means you won’t lose all your data. You should take a complete backup of your website at least once a week and store it in a secure location.

Conclusion

By following these best practices, you can significantly reduce the risk of cyber attacks and ensure that your website is bulletproof in 2019 and beyond. Although cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated every day, by staying vigilant and taking proactive steps towards cybersecurity, you can ensure that your website remains secure against these threats. Remember to always be proactive, stay informed, and implement the latest security measures to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals.

But, even in the era of increasingly scary data breaches and cyberattacks, you can take action to protect your website. These days, hackers typically use automated scripts to search for vulnerable websites and exploit those vulnerabilities. Here’s what you need to know to stay safe.

Use HTTPS

As of July 2019, Google has begun marking sites that don’t use HTTPS as insecure. So if you don’t use HTTPS to secure your site, you’ll soon begin to see a significant drop in your web traffic, if you haven’t already, as Google redirects users away from your site. What’s HTTPS? It’s a protocol that ensures website security by guaranteeing that users are communicating with the right server and that the content they’re viewing can’t be intercepted in transit. That means you should definitely be using HTTPS protection for any pages that collect information users might want to keep private, from login credentials to credit card information. But using HTTPS for your website regardless will boost your SEO, pushing your page closer to the top of Google search returns, and it will prevent attacks from being able to impersonate users and hijack login sessions. With services like Let’s Encrypt, you can use HTTPS for your entire site, for free.

Keep Your Software Up to Date

You may not need to be told this, but keeping your software up to date is one of the most important things you can do to keep your website safe, even in 2019. This includes both the software that you’re running on your website, such as your CMS, and your server operating system. It’s important to keep this software updated because hackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities they can exploit for nefarious purposes. Software updates patch these security holes so hackers can’t get in. Of course, they may still find vulnerabilities that developers aren’t yet aware of, but that’s why you should use a multi-pronged approach to website security.

Prioritize Vulnerability Detection with a Website Scanner

A website scanner is a security tool that runs in the background of your website and can identify malware, vulnerabilities and other issues. There are different kinds of website scanners available, including external and internal malware scanners and penetration scanners, and each serves its own purpose for the detection and removal of malware. External malware scanners crawl the pages of your site just like search engine bots, looking for malicious script or links, while internal malware scanners monitor your website’s source code. For example, did you know that hackers can use your website’s form field to inject malicious script into the database? They can — it’s called SQL injection, and it’s one of the means by which hackers can destroy your website, alter your content or steal yours or your customers’ personal data. External and internal malware scanners protect against these and other attacks, while penetration testers search for weaknesses in your website’s source code.

Automate Malware Removal

Automated malware removalis a must for protecting your website because it’s vital that you get any malware off of your site right away to thwart hackers. The best way to protect your website from malware is to use an automated website scanner that identifies malware and gets rid of it as soon as it is detected. In addition, a good website scanning application will:

Monitor ports on your serverto protect your site from unauthorized users; Monitor file changes and FTPand notify you of any changes to your website; Protect your database from SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS)attacks; and Keep your information secure and your website off of search engines’ blacklists.

In 2019, your business needs a website — and you need to make the security of that website a priority. Don’t let hackers exploit vulnerabilities in your website that could cost you your business. Keep your website safe with a quality website malware scanner.