Website Protection: 5 Things to Know

Website security is the collective term for all sorts of security measures that one takes for the sole purpose of protecting one’s website. People in workplaces, companies, and even at home, go to great lengths to secure their websites from nefarious third-parties. Through the practice of website security, one can secure their web connection as well as their applications from all security concerns lurking on the internet. Website security experts have been in demand for the past few years as there has been an influx in the frequency and severity of hacking incidents.

Some of the usual tasks that website security teams handle on a day-to-day basis are explained below;

• Handling website traffic

Owning a website means a constant flow of traffic irrespective of high or low performance. This makes visibility and control of website traffic necessary for the owner of that particular website. Maintaining a web presence means keeping track of who accesses it over the internet and looking out for bad traffic. Usually, bad traffic comes from harmful and malicious bots.

• Website data protection:

Whatever data someone puts on their website is their own property. This type of data could hold a customer’s sensitive information or even organisational data related to the owners or their company. Protecting all this data is the responsibility of expert website security teams. Through the best of security measures, they ensure that an attacker cannot breach the web application.

• Website reputation protection

For online businesses and some others, the company website represents customer trust and their own competence. When a professional website’s reputation goes down, then it also impacts the entire business negatively. But web security professionals are hired to protect the reputation of a website from potential hackers who attempt to compromise the website’s security and severely damage the brand.

• Website security automation

Even though website security is a well-known necessity for both business and personal use, a skills shortage is a real issue. Most organisations fail to have sufficient manpower to make sure their website security is not compromised by third-party attackers. In such a situation, it is better to automate the important security tasks and make the most of one’s resources to defend a website.

• Minimising website downtime

A website’s overall quality is measured by many aspects, and one of them is its availability. A lot of websites and web applications, such as the ones that are government-owned, have to be up 24/7. Any website that offers critical services must not face downtime, especially when users need it. When an attacker breaches the security layer of a website, downtime occurs. It affects the website’s reputation and leads to revenue loss.

Choosing the Right Kind of Website Security Solution

Now that we’ve established what website security tasks require, it’s time to determine what kind of web security solution can assist you. Each one of the following solutions is meant to solve one or more security concerns for a website.

APT Protection

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threats, which primarily target websites and web applications nowadays. APT focuses on a group of vulnerabilities that plague any website to quietly bypass the wall of security. Once inside the system, APT would slowly move laterally and eventually gain access to sensitive data and the system. The most threatening fact about APT is that there is no singular tool that is effective. But any website security solution with the following features can help:

• Protection from backdoor shells

• Detection of lateral movement

• WAF stands for web application firewall.

DDoS Mitigation

DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, is a type of cyberattack that has transformed over the years. But over the years, modern DDoS protection services have grown quite capable of protecting you. If a website ever faces a large-scale DDoS attack, then website security services can scale up the network of cloud-based computers to handle any level of the attack. A DDoS protection service allows authentic requests to proceed while removing all bad requests from the network. DDoS mitigation features include

• Capable of defending against both network and application layer attacks.

• It decrypts and scrubs SSL traffic.

• Accelerates recovery and response time.

Bot Management

Most of the cyber attacks that threaten modern network systems are pulled off with the use of bots. These automated bots can make their way into any web presence, seek vulnerabilities, and exploit them. Automated bots are also used for productive work, such as improving a website’s performance. Tracking and identifying malicious bots is only possible through bot protection solutions available for web security. Some must-have features of bot management solutions are:

• Tracks behavior profiles over time to distinguish between human users and bots.

• Maintains a database containing bot signatures to identify malicious bots in the current traffic.

Considering the rise in online threats and malware, most businesses are taking website security measures to safeguard their data and web presence.