Tag Archives: software
5 Website Security Issues You Should Be Aware Of?
Technology has become more advanced, and with it, hack attacks in the online world are increasing at an alarming rate.
Hackers use known vulnerabilities in third-party softwares to target your website and web server, and use it for their advantage.
The effect of this maybe just defacing of your website, stealing your confidential client data, or even worse, use your server resources to perform illegal activities.
There are some simple tips you can leverage to strengthen your website software and sleep with peace of mind.
- XSS or Cross Site Scripting
- SQL Injection
- DoS or Denial of Service Attack
- Weak Passwords
- Brute-force Attack
- Code Injection
- Unencrypted Protocol
- Debug Mode on Production Server
- Old Software Versions
- No Backup Plan
XSS occurs when a hacker embeds scripting code into a web form or url, and run malicious code to change your web visitor’s experience and steal passwords or other data.
XSS can also be persistent nature, where an attacker can manipulate a specific web page and show it as a login screen to users. The recent XSS comment hack on WordPress 4.2 is an example of such permanent loophole.
SQL injection occurs when a hacker uses a web form field or URL parameter to manipulate your database. Almost all web platforms have a database and generally open source CMS platforms maintain dynamic aspects of the website in database.
Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks are by far the most notorious kinds of attacks.
That is because, any level of hacker with a small investment can bombard a victim website, with millions of requests, and make them look like they are legit users.
This eventually crashes the web server, and makes the site offline, requiring manual intervention to bring it back online.
We should all use complex passwords, because the weakest link is all it takes to break the chain. It is imperative to use strong passwords for admin areas, but equally important for all users to protect the security of their accounts.
One account compromised can lead to another and that could lead to admin account hacked. It is recommended to have passwords with minimum 8 letters, digits and special characters to avoid quick password guesses.
These attacks are trial-n-error methods to guess your username and password. Weak passwords are prone to getting hacked easily.
Methods like temporary blocking of IP and accounts, and multi-factor authentication, help mitigating such attacks.
Websites with file upload capability, or sites missing proper client and server side form validation, can be dangerous.
The risk is that any file uploaded, could contain a script which can be leveraged as root-kit ie. administrator access to your website.
Lack of form validation on simple form fields could lead to malicious code being inserted into the database, and could cause undesirable results in your website.
An unencrypted channel allows man-in-middle attack to steal information from your users.
It preferred to use security certificate SSL, whenever passing personal information between the website and web server or database.
Some developers may accidentally enable debug mode on the live production server, which dumps extensive error logs to the browser.
Thus a hacker can obtain valuable information about the softwares used by the webserver and target his attack much better. Its crucial to hide as much internal information about server to minimize and delay the attacks.
It may seem obvious, but ensuring you keep all software up to date is vital in keeping your site secure. This applies to both the server operating system and any software you may be running on your website such as a CMS or forum.
When website security holes are found in software, hackers are quick to abuse them.
No matter how much vigilant you are, attackers can find new loopholes to doom your website. So besides prevention, you should also have a backup-restore plan.
Just in case your site is compromised, you should have a team which can quickly restore the last known backup, and avoid reputation and sales loss.
Coversine provides a simple affordable solution to all these problems. Your own security professional who will maintain your site’s uptime, performance and security, all-in-one for as low as $10 per month.
The subscription takes care of performance checks, and regular updates to softwares and apps as well.
How RSS Feed Submissions Can Elevate Your Online Visibility
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS Feed Submission was designed for people to get their news from news publishers automatically as soon as the news articles are published. The consumer subscribes to an RSS feed that he or she is interested in. From that moment on, as soon as a new article is added, the readers newsreader is notified. The newsreader then downloads a copy of the new article, and the consumer can then read the article at their leisure. There are many free news readers available on the internet. Also, most email applications double as newsreaders.
RSS Feed Submission is a powerful form of marketing that can attract the interest of the search engines and reach potential customers for any established business, or any business thats just starting out. Now you can reach a wider audience when you post content onto an RSS feed and allow other people or websites to subscribe to your content.
This process is called a feed and most social media sites such as Tweeter, Facebook and MySpace use RSS Feed to distribute their content and news. News is a perfect content for feed, and studies show that the number one source of news in the 18-54 year old age group is the internet. Also, images and news are in fact the most clicked content on web pages. Your company can benefit by using RSS Feed as part of your integrated online marketing strategy. By adding feeds to your news, you can tap into the power of the social web. Ultimately, you can distribute news, new product release, sales and much other information about your company instantly.
RSS feeds keep your audience constantly updated by allowing your customers to easily stay informed about your newest products and services. It also saves people time by allowing them to see your content using their favorite news reader and without having to visit your site. Now that may sound like a bad idea, but in todays fast-paced world anything that saves people time is valued. Most people never go back to visit a website they intended to visit at one time.
If you update your site regularly with news about new products and/or services, the chances of visitors coming back to your site to see those update is very slim. But with constant content updates through RSS Feed Submission, the customer has the chance to see those updates in their news reader provided they subscribed to your RSS feed. This instantly creates a long lasting form of communication between you and the consumer.
RSS Feeds are created using eXtended Markup Language (XML). To create a feed you can use one of the many available authoring tools on the internet. Another way is to put up a blog by blogging software that usually contains build-in codes that will submit your feed to RSS directories every time you make a new post. This can be tricky for some people. Most blogging software can be intimidating to install due to complexity and lack of documentation. There are also hosted blogs like WordPress and Blogger that contain those build-in codes, but customizing your blog can be difficult. Blogging sites and software may offer some limited submission to blog directories. To get results, you want your blog entries to be posted as many blog directories as possible. It is not practical to do this manually. There are some services and software programs to help you submit your blog to blog directories. The best method to get the word out is to use online services that create and maintain RSS Feed solutions for your company for a nominal fee.
The benefits of RSS are endless. You can attract users and keep them coming back for more by constantly sending out news. Its worth the time to look into RSS Feed Submission for your company to stay above todays highly competitive online marketing, and the ever growing technology landscape!