Website Hacking 3 Basic Tips To Protect Your Business

If your business website has ever been the victim of hacking, then you know the extent of the damage hackers can cause.  Repairing the damage done by hackers can cost a lot of time and money.  The most difficult thing to repair is the trust of your customers if their financial information has been stolen.  There are many ways for you to protect your business website from being hacked.  Security experts advise webmasters to avail themselves of as many defenses as they can.

Computer hackers are an intelligent bunch.  They do not waste their time on targets with no value.  Most often, they are looking for sites that offer a financial benefit, such as customer credit card information. Here are 3 essentials that can help you to keep your website and your customers financial information safe from hackers. 

  • Change Every Password Regularly - The most secure passwords use numbers, letters, and symbols that are random and thus impossible for a would-be thief to guess.  Do not reveal any password to anyone, and change them all on a regular basis.  Every 90 days is generally recommended.  Any important databases or sensitive information, including financial information, should be secured with a password.  Be sure to use different passwords for everything.  Otherwise, a single security breach can result in the loss of all of your information, and cost you more money than you can afford. 
  • Keep Your Source Code Secure - If a hacker discovers your source code, they can then use your code to create a site of their own and thus steal your business.  Fortunately, there are many easy to use scripts that can make your source code impervious to hacking.  Unfortunately, too few webmasters use those scripts.
  • Understand How To Use Robots.txt - Robots.txt is an amazingly effective line of code.  This code tells the search engine spiders which web pages it should index, and which it should not.  Web pages that do not get indexed by the search engines are invisible to everyone.  To secure sensitive data on your website, put it on one page and use robots.txt to hide the page from the search engine spiders and make it impossible to find. 

The favorite targets of hackers are websites belonging to small businesses, as they generally know little about hacking.  Hackers find the defenses on these websites particularly easy to breach, because small businesses do not usually have the resources to afford the kind of web site security that large corporations take for granted.  They also lack the technical expertise to know where their weaknesses are and how to defend them.  This lack of technical expertise makes the damage caused by hackers even more problematic, as it means detecting and repairing the problems takes longer. 

When websites are attacked by hackers, search engines can blacklist those sites.  This happens especially when the sites are subsequently used to spread malware or viruses.  If visitors to your website are every greeted with This site may be compromised, it is assured that any subsequent traffic will slow to a trickle.  Recovering from this is almost impossible. 

Website security services offer businesses the opportunity to monitor their websites for malware or viruses.  They scan your site regularly and warn you about hacking threats.  Googles Webmaster Tools can also help secure your site and keep you from being blacklisted.  Webmaster Tools will alert you any time your site becomes infected with plenty of time to fix the problem before your site is blacklisted. 

An online presence is essential for a small business to succeed.  The internet can be an unsafe place for businesses.  Customers are becoming aware of the risks, and a wary about the kind of information they share online.  They expect that their data will be safe from hacking.  Businesses owe it to their customers to protect their financial information.

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