There are many different reasons why website owners must do all they can to protect their portals from hackers. In fact, if you own an e-commerce portal, you must have already faced some sort of hacking attempt. On the other hand, hackers not just focus on e-commerce websites, they go after simple websites too. And that’s the reason why every web admin needs comprehensive web security solutions.
These web security products must be picked and used only after carrying out a thorough review of each one of them. Let’s take you through some useful tips that will help you prevent such hacking attempts on your website.
Keep everything updated
You must keep your operating system as well as every application software, for instance content management systems, antivirus software, anti-malware and other web security tools updated to their latest versions. It’s important for your hosting service provider to also keep their systems regularly updated. That’s the reason you must always go with a hosting service well known for focusing heavily on its security measures.
Guard against the XSS (cross site scripting) attacks
It’s fairly easy for hackers to inject malicious JavaScripts into your webpages, and change your webpages’ content whenever anyone accesses them. Thereafter, the visitors’ login cookie details and credentials would get stolen upon their visit. It is important that you prevent injection of any such scripts into your webpages.
Form data validation
It’s recommended that you carry out both server side as well as browser side validation of the form data. Such two-level validation would ensure that no malicious scripts are entered into the webpages, via the data form fields.
Prevention of SQL injection attacks
Website owners are advised to always use the parameterised queries instead of the standard Transact SQL as the latter can help hackers in insertion of rogue scripts.
A comprehensive file uploading policy
You might need to allow your visitors and users to upload images and/or files to your Web server, as a part of your business needs. Hackers can make use of such facilities and upload malicious data on your website. Any uploaded images or documents could actually be malware. Hence, it is important to enable uploads only if absolutely needed and with great caution. You must do away with the execute permissions for those files to ensure complete security of your website.
Stringent password policy
You must implement stringent password policies for your website and make sure that they are followed by every single user. These users must be educated about the importance of keeping strong passwords.
The recommended password length should be more than eight characters, including special characters, numerals and upper/lower case alphabets. Dictionary words must be completely avoided and the users must be urged to keep longer passwords. Furthermore, if anyone needs to store his/her passwords somewhere for authentication purposes, they should always do so in an encrypted format.