Why secure your website?
Use of internet has become mandatory for most of the businesses today, and the people who use internet has increased since year 2000. (from 361,000,000 – in year 2000 to 2,267,000,000 – in year 2011 approximately.)
Above figures shows, how much impact a hacker / virus can do if they attack internet. Yes, it’s not a safe place anymore. There are millions of viruses released to internet and it keeps increasing the numbers.
What are the main threats?
Some of the most common infections we found on websites are Malware, Spyware & Torjans.. All these are unauthorized programs injected to your website which have ability to….
- Delete or damage your website files and data
- Collect your personal or customer information
- Damage your PC or your visitors’ PCs
- Download & Install unauthorized applications to your PC
- Prevent visitors from visiting your website
- Rank your website in search engines as a risky site and put down your SEO
You might think if your website is infected, it is fully recoverable by installing older backup or by cleaning the virus. Truth is you will get your website back if you have regular backups, but still you might lose most of your SEO work done so far. And it will be an extra cost to re install and get site to healthy condition.
We recently came across a website that was infected by a Malware. However the client had reinstalled an old backup with the help of hosting provider. But the malware was something which promotes “Viagra”. Even though they recovered website, it was shown as a Viagra promoting website in Google Search. This is the last thing any of the website owners want to see and it’s not recoverable easily. You might have to use Google Master tools and contact google to get these corrected or will have to wait till Google scans your website as a healthy website. It will take time to get your search engine terms corrected.
This article was written with the own experience of Dsynit (Pvt) Limited. Before you think about strengthening your website security ask below questions from yourself to calculate the risk.
- How many customers visit your website monthly?
- How much of businesses/ income you receive from the website?
- What is the loss, if you lose the website?
Even if it’s a HTML coded site or CMS (Content Management System) based website you should maintain it well. Most of the website owners think they are fully independent if they have CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. They are easy to manage than hand coded HTML sites, but they need maintenance. This was explained in our Previous Article here.
