Protect your website from hackers with a Website Firewall

Security experts have determined that the Mossack Fonseca or ‘Panama Papers’ hack was possible due to a vulnerability in a popular WordPress plugin which led to a chain of events that allowed access to a huge quantity of email correspondence. This has had a worldwide impact aside from being very embarrassing for the company. Many companies often do not appreciate the importance of having a Website Firewall service to protect their website until it is too late. Such a service provides a shielding safeguard designed to protect websites from attacks that network firewalls or intrusion prevention systems typically cannot. Using advanced security software to protect against vulnerabilities mitigates the problems caused by such attacks.

A website firewall service benefits your website in several ways:

• Provides comprehensive real-time protection from external threats including malware, exploitation of outdated software, brute force and denial of service attacks

• Ensures better Administration isolation and encourages policy enforcement for administrator logins including two-factor authentication and can also restrict Administrator access from specific locations

• Prevents websites from getting blacklisted by Google as a malware distribution point, helping to avoid Google’s dreaded ‘This site may be hacked’ or ‘This site may harm your computer’ messages – which means loss of traffic and therefore loss of business

• Boosts website performance since only good traffic reaches your website, threats are blocked. It also helps reduce website bandwidth costs.

• Offers complete recovery and cleanup in case of having been hacked prior to implementing the service so that you start with a clean slate

Hackers continuously scan websites for vulnerabilities in attempts to gain control over or infect the sites using several different methods such as database injection (a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious database instructions are inserted into an entry field for execution) and cross site scripting among others. Additionally, hackers will perform what are called brute force attacks whereby they try to discover which passwords allow them to access the any login sections of your website, using techniques such as dictionary attacks, often using automated bots to go through several username and password combinations, over time until one works. Apart from the obvious threat, these continuous threats place additional load on your web server, slowing it down.

With a website firewall service in place, when anyone types in your website name i.e. www.yourdomainname.com, the request is sent to the service first, analyzed and scanned against known attack methods and signatures, and if no malicious patterns are detected, the firewall service passes clean, legitimate traffic on to your web server.

Having a website firewall service also helps protect and may also enhance your site’s Google rankings. This is because site performance will increase (and Google prefers fast-loading sites) and also having an infected site can cause Google to drop you out of their index altogether, until the issue is resolved, resulting in lost traffic and business. A website firewall will also protect your website from Search Engine Poisoning (SEP) attacks, which is when hackers try to use your site to take advantage of popular search terms to attract visitors, only to then infect them with malware via their browsing activity.

CaribMedia provides website firewall services to several of our clients, starting at less than US$20 per month. If you are also interested in protecting your website, please Contact Us today for more information.