Monday, July 12, 2010

Infected Website

Computer technology and network connections have grown to become central in our lives today. With the increased usage and dependability on computers, the crimes associated with them have risen in popularity to match this growth in usage. As a result, hacking has become a prevalent issue, and most of the time the consequences of a hack can have adverse results to the victim of an infected website.

Years ago, no one had to worry about hackers breaking into their website and installing Trojan viruses, or using your website to send attacks against others. Now that things have changed, people need to be aware of how to protect their website from harmful intrusions and how to stop hackers. Hacking has evolved quite a bit over the years. Why do they hack websites? The most common reason is to steal money. Some times hacking is for blackmail. Sometimes hacking is for revenge, or stalking or fame.

One of the basic fears for the minority of website owners is being the victim of a vicious hack attack. However, the majority of website owners are confident that their system will not be broken into because there is nothing in the site that could be of interest to the hacker. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The internet is prevalent with countless possibilities. Your website can be a launching point for other attacks. Hackers could use your system as a staging-off point to carry out attacks to other computers. This is a regular occurrence on the net. Many Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are executed in this manner.

Everyone needs to worry about hackers. Hackers do not discriminate when it comes to whose website they hack. In fact, smaller websites tend to get hacked more than larger websites. With so much of the world dependent on computers, hackers have become a powerful force and everyone must be aware of this or suffer the consequences of a hacked website.

If you have ever had your website hacked then you are all too familiar with that sickening feeling in your stomach caused by mixed feelings including violated, vulnerable, helpless, confused, angry and disgusted. If you have had your website hacked then you are not alone. There are a countless number of hacked websites, many of which do not even know that they are a website infected by a malicious hacker. According to the 2009 Security Threat Report from Sophos, one new infected Web page is discovered every 4.5 seconds.

Why then are there so many hacked and infected websites? Many website owners do not see the need for preventative measures - until their website has been infected. Most website owners spend most of their time, money and effort in building traffic to their website. There are often hundreds, perhaps even thousands of businesses offering the same or similar products and services so they put most of their efforts into the necessary steps to stay ahead of the competition. Adding website protection and security is very often put on the back burner.

You can spend time, money and effort in building traffic to your website, but you can't even calculate the amount of trust lost if your site has been trying to infect all your visitors. If Google finds your site suspicious, they'll add "This site may harm your computer" on all your Google search engine result pages (SERPs). How do you think this will affect your online marketing plans? Who knows how many of your customers will stop buying from you.

Hackers don't leave traces of their attack on the outside. Your site may appear working normally on the surface but underneath, your system data might have been trashed, altered, copied or, at worse, deleted. Valuable data can be up for grab to the highest bidder. Not only can your data be sold online; enterprising hackers can also sell your security leaks to other hackers, spies and cyberterrorists.

It is considerably more expensive and more time-consuming to recover from a security incident than to take preventative measures ahead of time.

It is a more worthwhile use of your time to do everything you can to protect your site from all hackers, regardless of who they are, and understand that there will be a constant flood of attacks against your site. The more difficult you make it for someone to attack your website, the less likely they will even try.

Most people who have websites do not realize that it requires only a few simple steps to ensure some degree of security for your website at absolutely no cost to you. These steps take only minutes to do and no special software or programming knowledge is required. Granted, these basic security steps may not give you the full protection you need, but it will put you ahead of those who do not have any website protection and security at all.

In this blog, you will find an article called "Basic Website Protection and Security Steps", where you learn more about these free security steps.

Always remember that hackers, like burglars, are opportunists. If you take the security measures to keep your website safe, a hacker will swiftly move on to a site that is less well protected. Securing your website can take minutes, but gives you a lifetime of peace of mind.

It is of the upmost importance to remember that, any website connected to the internet is automatically vulnerable to hacker attacks, and will eventually be attacked. Thinking your website will never be attacked is a falsehood that could destroy your website and your online business.

1 comment:

  1. I am currently conducting a survey on website security and usability to assess the awareness of it. The survey can be found on http://www.datacurve.com/website-integrity-security.html

    I would really appreciate any responses as awareness needs to be raised over this issue!

    Thanks,

    Charlie

    ReplyDelete