Website Security Measures, Best Practices and Tools

What is Website Security?

Website security is a way of protecting the websites and web application from being hacked or any unauthorized access, done by creating an extra layer of a protection measure and protocol that helps in mitigating the attacks.

Website security is not a simple task, and to secure websites and application then the security comprises of a lot of factors that go into web security and web protection, like up to date regarding new threats and how to mitigate it, monitor the traffic.

In today’s Digital World, Internet revolutionized and everyone is shifting business online. People proving their presence on the Internet to reach as many people as possible and increase revenue. According to Netcraft, as of September 2014, there were over 1 billion websites on the web, and present statics show around 2 billion websites are on the Internet which means website security will become necessary in the upcoming years.

The sites increasing day by day, but lots of people do not care about the security initially, and such sites prone to lots of vulnerabilities, which gives hacker or attacker a chance to compromise the data. According to “SiteLock,” a security provider for websites state that the average website attacked 44 times a day in the last quarter of 2017. It’s nothing as in today’s world even the most secure websites not reliable and get hacked or compromised, imagine what happened to those sites which are not concerned about security.

Website Common Attacks

There can be a number of attacks an attacker performs on websites but below are some common attack happening on today’s websites -

• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
• SQL Injection (SQLi)
• DDoS Attack
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
• Malware
• Broken Authentication & Session Management
• Bad Bots
• Exploiting Inclusion Vulnerabilities: LFI and RFI

Benefits of Securing Websites

Benefits of secure websites, it’s not a one way means by securing websites both user and owner both benefited.

• Improve Google ranking and SEO.
• Protect user’s information.
• Stay away from Phishing sites.
• Build the trust between user and service provider, and increase website legitimacy.
• Increased ROI.
• Improves site performance.
• Increase website legitimacy.

How does Website Security Work?

Website security working depends on how organizations adopted its security, and many other factors like their network type, software, but the core strategy somewhat similar.

Common security concerns when someone tries to mitigate through security -

Web application firewalls (WAF)

Web application firewalls (WAF) are an essential security control used by the security team to protect Web applications and sites against various attack, and known vulnerabilities. Customize it, after customizing WAF is also able to prevent SQL injection attacks, XSS attacks, buffer overflows, and session hijacking. All these features may not be available or performed on traditional network firewalls systems. It’s categorized as Network-based, Host-based, CLoud-hosted WAFs.Deployed in front of web applications, and it analyzes bi-directional web-based (HTTP) traffic — detecting and blocking anything malicious.

SSL Working

Whenever a browser or server attempts to connect to a website secured with SSL. The browser/server requests for identification. Then a copy of SSL certificate sent by the webserver to browser/server. The browser/server checks to see whether it should trust the SSL certificate or not. And according to it sends messages to the webserver. If the certificate looks good, the webserver sends back a digitally signed acknowledgement for starting an SSL encrypted session. Now the exchange of data proceeds in the encrypted ways between the browser/server and the webserver.

How to Adopt Website Security?

The adaptation differs from the organization to organization, below are some fundamental strategies to implement the security for the website -

Adoption Practices

• Always review code.
• Keep software up-to-date.
• Use HTTPS.
• Separate the automation and nonautomation steps, and perform accordingly.

Enabling Monitoring

• Analyzing network traffic.
• Implement a web application Firewall.
• Use vulnerabilities scanner and anti-virus tools.

Setting Up Recovery

• Regularly keep backup of websites’ data.
• Always plan for recovery from any disaster, build a strategy for this.

Why Website Security Matters?

• So that sites can’t get hacked.
• Prevent the theft of customer’s data and any other sensitive information.
• Securing sites make it genuine and users feel safe.
• Improve Google Search Ranking.
• Avoid Unwanted Litigation.

Best Practices of Website Security

The security is not a small thing especially in websites or web application. Security varies from organization to organization but some security standards must, and these standards implemented and highlighted by the OWASP. The primary goal is to fulfil the fundamental goal of security, i.e. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

BluePrint — First thing, is to make a roadmap and the measure to secure the websites.

Prioritize Your WebSites Vulnerabilities, and mitigate accordingly -

Find out common attacks that can we performed on certain kind of websites, and mitigate it first.

Should know which attack have minimal effect on your websites and ignored.

Should be familiar with various vulnerabilities that may exist in your applications.

Data criticality and risk analysis of data exposure.

Document the attacks and its precaution measure.

Educate for secure coding.

Hire some good security team, tester -

Implement Web application firewalls (WAF) and enable extra security layers, like -

• HTTPS implementation and redirecting of all HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
• Implement X-XSS-protection security header for preventing XSS attacks.
• Implement a content security policy.
• Multi-Factor Authentication.
• Update Softwares and TLS or SSL

Guide for keeping the Right Password

Implement backup and disaster recovery measures, backup website’s data, like -

Website Security Tools and Checklist

Security or Vulnerabilities scanners tools -

• Black Box, White Box, and Fuzzing testing tools.
• Scan My Server
• Sucuri
• Quttera
• Detectify
• Vega

Holistic Strategy of Securing Website

In the world of digital, every brand is available on a search engine in the form of a website. Also, the sudden growth of e-commerce websites has compelled companies to tighten their website security due to unlimited daily transactions. Hence, website security has become the necessity in today’s world. To learn more, you are advised to look into the below steps:

• learn more about ” Application Security Checklist“
• Know more about “ Continuous Security Tools“

Originally published at https://www.xenonstack.com on December 20, 2018.