Your website is too precious. Secure it!

Cyber attacks are increasing in numbers everyday and hence the importance of creating a secure site and ensuring security is mandatory. Being secure is important to protect your website and the data it contains. This year 63 % of all internet traffic attacks originate from automated sources like hacking tools, spammers, and bots among others.

Reasons why we need website security.

1. Hackers target your website’s customers
2. The count of the hacked website rises rapidly
3. Reputation loss and drop in business
4. Cleaning is more expensive than protection
5. The website added to blacklist in browsers

Hackers target your visiting customers on your website.

Malicious code is used to infect websites which eventually ends up removing website data and in some cases, can even hijack computer resources. Once attackers get access, they can redirect website traffic and also infect visitors with the malicious code.

Different types of malware are used infect your website by, but the infection is done mostly by an automated hacking process. A common factor is that hacked websites are mostly used to retarget your potential customers and website visitors.

The count of the hacked website rises rapidly

Google has announced that more than 50 million websites around the world have been infected by malicious codes now against 17 million in March 2015. The number of new web application attacks published in 2017 was 212% greater than in 2016.

The number of websites created is increasing phenomenally and many of them are a severe attack, especially those on Wordpress. WordPress CMS is exploited by hackers from time to time.

Reputation loss and drop in business revenue.

There are over 1.3 billion websites today and people visiting them trust the search engines when they want to get information from those sites. Therefore Search Engine Optimization is more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it can provide for every business.

Google and other search engines warn visitors and restrict them from entering websites that have been attacked by malware. When your site is hacked and added to different blacklists, the valuable customer cannot reach to the products or services being offered.

When a potentially valuable customer visits to your site and gets warned or infected, there is an extremely low chance that the customer will visit your site again.

Cleaning is costlier than protection:

If you are running a website and find your website has been hacked, the first thing to search for would be “How to clean the malware in hacked site”. There will be plenty off blog posts and articles about malware clean up, but all of them will eventually recommend the same thing — have a professional to do the job...

For the WordPress website, malware removal is not an easy task as website cleaning cost is higher than creating one. Even if the task is taken up, one cannot be sure if the site was thoroughly cleaned or not.

The process of malware clean-up of a website is also about trying to find out the mind of the hacker than manually going through the files.

The malware code is hidden from the website core files and the database and attackers take a lot of work effort into making sure you won’t be able to remove their backend so easily.

The website is added to a blacklist on browsers:

Blacklist is the process of browser search engines removing the malware attacked websites from their search index. Once the website is blacklisted from Google, the webmaster verification is done and the website is shown in the search index. Else, you can see the red alert screen with the content “this website contains malware. This is harmful to your system.” Due to this, a site loses nearly 95% of its organic traffic which can severely impact sales and revenue.

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that malware attacks on websites will continue. Attackers are active and on the prowl, waiting for the right moment to strike and demand a ransom or to settle scores due to personal enmity or business rivalry. The hard truth is that attacks have been on the rise and are likely to be so. Irrespective of whether you are running a blog, the website of a small firm or an e-commerce website, one needs to be alert. It is the primary responsibility of all stakeholders to be aware and ready to thwart attacks at their first instance. Companies have to keep their anti-virus databases updated. Staff should be trained and firewall configured. The basics of a secure password should be strictly and more importantly, software systems should be monitored regularly to detect even the slightest suspicious activity immediately.