Bulletproofing Your Site: Prevent Your Business from Getting Hacked

It’s one of those “it could never happen to me” scenarios, not unlike a home burglary. Your company website is just there, minding its own business, and by the time it’s already too late, you learn that you’ve been hacked. Maybe they’re just preventing people from accessing your products and services.
Or maybe things are really bad and they’ve gotten a hold of your customer’s personal information, costing you a good deal of business, funds and resources, and most importantly consumer trust.
You don’t want the world to find out that you didn’t take preventative measures when you had the chance, so what can you do right now to lock your website down as tightly as possible?

Image Courtesy of PCCare247 Inc. on Flickr

Safety First – Security Should Be Your Site’s Top Priority

You want to reach out to customers and make money with your site from the moment it goes live, but even before that happens, there are a number of things you can do to prevent anyone from disrupting your plans.
First things first, any passwords and logins used to access your site should be encrypted. The strength of the password should also be at least above average (capital and lowercase characters with a number or symbol), thus making the encryption that much stronger inherently. Nobody likes to have to remember two dozen passwords, but in this instance, anyone with considerable access should have a unique password to access your systems.
After that, you want to have firewalls and access monitoring in place to make sure that the only people able to use your site are the ones you want to be there in the first place. If someone does get into restricted areas without proper authorization, the monitoring will at least give you an idea of who that might be, how they hacked you, and how to prevent them from doing any serious damage.

Backup Important Data to Avoid Digital Vandalism

Certain online groups are known to take down websites either because the company conflicts with their political or moral views, or as part of some kind of cyber-anarchist demonstration. These groups are extremely motivated and capable, and it can be difficult to do anything substantial to try and stop them.
While the odds of being targeted by such a group are low, take the initiative to routinely backup any files that are a part of your website on physical, offline storage media. This way, if any key components of your site are altered or deleted, you can replace it with the correct content once the crisis is over.

Offline Security: More Important Than Anything Else

Hackers can flood your bandwidth and slow your site to a stall, or they can run scripts that guess a number of passwords to find a weak link in your authorization tools, but the most effective, commonplace point of entry for malicious activity is through old-fashioned social engineering.
By either email, phone calls, or even an on-site visit, someone can get the information they need to break down your defenses without any kind of high-tech trickery. Make sure that any workstations in your physical office are locked when not in use. Never give anyone a password under any circumstances – your IT professionals either have access to this information, or if they’re being even more cautious, will simply reset things so that you can change to a new password if necessary.
Even innocuous details about family members, pets, alma mater, or favorite vacation spot can be used to narrow down password possibilities to make guesswork easier. The best strategy is to simply keep any small talk with people you don’t know or trust on neutral subjects that have no potential for coming back to bite you.
No line of defense is perfectly safe from somebody bent on getting in, but as long as you do something to protect your business and your customers, and have monitors and tracking in place to help the authorities track down the responsible parties, you can prevent any serious damage from hackers befalling your business.