Understand the Importance of Website Safety
A website is an important customer touchpoint for many businesses. Therefore, website security is critical because it increases the trust of customers. Poor website security will result in a data breach and the loss of customer trust, which must be prevented.
The trust of customers is crucial to a company, because a study Trends in Customer Trust, conducted by Salesforce, stated that 95% of customers are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust. According to the same study, 59% of customers believe their personal information is vulnerable to a security breach.
To ensure the trust of customers, it is crucial that your website security is adequately set up to defend against any attacks. There are many ways to attack a website, and hackers utilise them to use attacks of all forms and shapes. It might seem complicated at first, but all the types of attacks use these common website security threats as the basis.
Common Website Security Threats
1) Spam
It is common to receive spam emails. We get them all the time in our inbox, sent by weird-looking email addresses or pretending to be legitimate emails sent from whomever they are pretending to be. These emails contain harmful attachments and links to malicious websites. Opening these will compromise the users’ devices as well as a website’s security.
Other common spams are those found in the comments section of a website. They are not only annoying, but also look bad for a website. Some of these spams contain malware that harms the users’ devices, or direct users to malicious websites. Search engines can detect these malicious links and blacklist the website if actions are not taken to solve it. The SEO of the website will be heavily damaged, and it will be extremely difficult for the website to recover.
2) Malware and Viruses
Malware stands for “malicious software” and allows hackers to manipulate a website. It opens access for attackers to steal sensitive data, distribute spams and malware, steal server resources, attack with denial of service and more. Malware and viruses come in all sorts of shapes and is a big threat for any websites, as they are difficult to remove. It is also difficult to recover from the damages caused by them.
3) WHOIS Domain Registration
Buying a domain name requires the submission of the domain owner’s information to the WHOIS database. The data is then stored along with other domain profile information, including the URL nameservers. The information is publicly available to anyone, and hackers can take advantage of this information to locate the server location to use it as a gateway to launch attacks on a website.
4) Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
A DDoS is an attack by hackers to take down or slow down significantly the service of a website. They use spoof IP addresses to send fake traffic to a website and overload the server hosting the website, making it offline and unable to deliver its intended service. Website owners will then need to get the server back up, and the server will be vulnerable to malware.
5) Vulnerability Exploits
Vulnerabilities of a website can include vulnerable codes or outdated plugins. Hackers will take advantage of these vulnerabilities to gain access to a site and take over the site to launch malicious activities. A few common examples include vulnerable codes that are susceptible to SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS), brute force attacks. Outdated plugins do not patch their vulnerabilities and provide an opportunity for hackers to exploit vulnerable codes.
6) Deceptive Websites
Hackers can also attack a website by creating deceptive websites, or fake versions of a website. Users are tricked into believing they are on the real authentic websites. The hackers then ask for confidential information from the users and capture the inputs from them. The users are essentially giving their information to the hackers instead of the legitimate website.
Conclusion
In this digital era, customers are more aware than ever of the importance of their data. Securing the data of customers should be the priority of all businesses. Website security is a crucial aspect in protecting the data of customers, and should not be taken lightly. Read here to learn what you can do to improve website security.
If you are feeling at a loss on how to implement web security for your website, we at WebNIC will be glad to help you out. We offer the industry’s leading web security solutions with value-added services. If you need any help, you are most welcome to contact us at [email protected]. Or you can live chat with us by clicking the green button on the bottom right of our website.
About WebNIC
WebNIC is accredited registrar for ICANN, and various countries including Asia, Europe, America, Australasia, and Africa. With offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan, we serve 4,500+ active resellers over 70 countries. To join us and become a reseller, live chat with us or email us at [email protected].