WEBSITE SECURITY ADVICE

RELATED : Broadshout Website Security Services

Any business which offers internet services to its clients, customers or members must think seriously about its websites security.
Whether you think your website could be an obvious target or not it can be a potentially huge embarrassment when something does goes wrong.

The consequences of a successful attack on a website could range from your site being put out of service, material defaced or deleted to sensitive data such as personal information, credit card details or passwords being stolen.

There have been many publicized cases of attacks on major websites and breaches of website security can cost a business dearly.

An attack on a website is not usually motivated by any particular dislike of the website or company/owner and can often be simply the result of a mass blanket style attack where many thousands of websites are targeted at once. Vulnerabilities in your websites programming/design or your hosting providers server configuration could be leaving your site open to attacks right now.

Below are two key considerations to make when setting up a website.

Choose your webhosting company with care and ask questions about privacy and security policies first. It's worth asking what measures are taken to prevent attacks at server level such as the quality of firewall and virus scanners installed on the server, how many other sites will also be running on the server, what type of sites are they? If another site on the server is exploited this could potentially effect all websites running on the same machine.
Ask your webdesign company/programmer about how they plan to protect sensitive data and administration areas of the site. This may be by using cookies or sessions to track legitimate administrators or password protection directories at server level. Documents such as resumes,CV's may have to be stored outside of the normal http accessible area. Likewise its worth asking about encryption of database passwords held within scripts. All data submitted by forms on the website should be scanned and checked for potential malicious entries especially those which allow file uploads.