Cyber Attacks and How To Stop Them

Security is one of the most critical aspects of any website. To protect not only your information from malicious individuals but also your visitors to your site too. Hackers do it for a variety of reasons. They range from personal vendetta to a website to a straightforward monetary incentive, or even just for the challenge. Some hackers want to use a popular unsecured site to help spread viruses and malware to the visitors. To help them gather information. There is no exact motive for these attacks, but one thing is for sure that they happen often and fast. Thus, it is essential to be proactive when designing a website to help defend against hackers.

We can think of a website as a safe with crucial information and money inside that hackers want to gain access to exploit. A safecracker has many tools in their arsenal to break into a safe, as do hackers. A safecracker can be methodical, and guess the combination of safe as too a hacker can phish for people passwords and information to gain access to accounts. On the other hand, a safecracker can rip a safe apart with tools, whereas hackers can brute force a password.

Type of Attacks

There are many types of attacks hacker use:

Keyloggers

Installing a keylogger on your site enables hackers to track key sequences and typed them on a keyboard. This is later logged and stored in a database. This is a common way for hackers to get personal information such as passwords and email credentials.

Denial of Service

Another type of attack is Dod/DDos. This is done by flooding a website with many requests until the server is unable to process all of them. This causes the server to crash eventually.

Phishing

Phishing is another common way to attack a website. It involves the hacker replicating a site and people trying to log in to the fake site while thinking it is real. The hacker then can gather the personal information and use it on the actual, thus compromising the real account. A hacker can also hijack the cookies on a browser. This can then can be used to access identity information. For example, access to cookies enables hackers to view user’s browser history, username, and passwords.

Brute Force Attack

One of the most aggressive and time-consuming ways to break into a website is by brute force. This involves hackers trying to generate a combination of letters and numbers to generate every possible combination and eventually crack a password. Though this is a time-consuming method, it can quickly break into websites with poor, short, and simple passwords.

SQL Injection

One of the most detrimental ways a website can be attacked is by SQL injection. It’s when the SQL script is injected and executed. This strikes the site’s database server and allows the hacker to transfer data and even manipulate and delete it.

How They Do It

There are many third-party programs that hackers use to attack websites. I’m not going to list them or promote unethical and illegal practices. Some of them are free and come with lower performance, whilst others are subscription-based. Given the data, these subscription ones are a lot more powerful compared to their free counterparts.

Not all hackers use third-party software to carry their attacks. Some hackers are talented and smart and design their programs to attack websites. These can be unique and hard to detect if done right. Professional Website developers take note of such patterns and constantly update and patch their websites to prevent such harmful attacks.

There are even infamous hacker groups on the internet that work in tandem to perform their attacks. Some of the famous hacker groups in the media are lizard squad and Anonymous. This is because of their high-profile attacks on celebrities and powerful corporations. They have spawned their own counterculture movement on media.

How to Prevent

If you don’t want your website to be taken down, compromised, it is essential to prevent it. It is better to proactive in your defense than to be reactive. Following steps web developers and web design agencies take to reduce the risk of websites being attacked:

Encrypt your data:

When you develop a website that contains personal information such as emails or passwords, encrypting that data is important. One of the easiest ways to help encrypt your data is to switch your website to HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). This is done by adding a few more lines of code to your site to help encrypt. How HTTPS works is it has an encryptor and a decryptor for both the client and website. When the client sends data to the website, it is then encrypted and transferred over to the server. Where it is subsequently decrypted back to what it initially was and stored. This is then mirrored in reverse when going from server to client.

To go the next step further with protecting people’s information, you can save the data collected and encrypt it. So in the case of a hacker getting inside, they then have to go through decrypting all the data inside instead of getting free reign to do what they like.

Passwords:

Having a secure password can make the difference in a brute force/dictionary attack. A strong password, something like P0Ffsd25G/aA, would take longer to break than a simple one. Remember, the longer, the better when it comes to passwords. Complexity is your friend when having secure passwords. In the example, you see lower and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. The more variation and complexity of your passwords, the more secure.

Also, change your passwords often. Don’t sit static with a password for too long. It takes a long time to crack into a website with the password Ex: P0Ffsd25G/aA. So don’t give people the opportunity to do so. Every few weeks, switch it up.

Don’t use the same password for everything. This should be common sense by now on the internet. But you would be surprised at how many hackers report getting into people’s bank accounts from getting a password from an unsecured website. If one website’s password is compromised and has the same password for everything, everything is compromised. Switch it up. Write your passwords down if you have to.

Don’t provide the opportunity for hackers with only one password for all!

Keep software up to date.

Companies are working around the clock to patch their programs from new attacks and flaws in code. So keep your software updated. It could save you the headache in recovering a website, as well as losing potential clients from a website that’s down for days. If you are using a Content Management System such as WordPress, you must keep it up to date.

A website’s security

By keeping up and being proactive will help in preventing an attack on your website. Every security measure missed will mean your opening the door for hackers. Remember, hackers, are always testing the security of your website by scanning for flaws and openings. Applications like “Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner” scan open-source software and can detect critical vulnerabilities. This can help users beef up their security against attacks by informing them of the flaws they might not know they have.

Periodically using this to monitor new editions or edits to your website is critical. It makes no sense to lock the front door to leave the side door open for people. Continually checking website vulnerabilities will help the process from securing simple holes to more complex attacks.

Summary of Acunetix scanning process:

1. Total initial vulnerabilities (a baseline of issues found by scanners and ones found through manual analysis)
2. Repeat vulnerabilities (the flaws that keep reoccurring along with why they’re not being resolved)
3. Remediation latency (the window of time it takes to deploy a fix along with any other details such as severity rating and specific type of problems such as coding or server configuration)
4. Vulnerabilities that are exploitable placing sensitive information at risk or otherwise impacting the business in a negative way (this might include SQL injection, XSS, weak passwords, and the like)
5. Vulnerabilities that go against industry practice but are not currently placing information or systems in immediate danger (this might include ASP.NET debugging being enabled, unhandled exceptions, IP addresses being revealed, etc.)
6. Vulnerabilities that are not present but are being sought out on your systems based on what you see in your server and application logs and network traffic analysis (this might include password cracking, denial of service attacks such as the slow HTTP attack, etc.)
7. Web security attacks successfully blocked at the network perimeter, application, database, or server level (again, this might include password cracking, denial of service, or even something more severe such as SQL injection)

Famous Cases

It does not matter how big or powerful a company is when it comes to being attacked by hackers. There have been a couple of big cases in recent years. Where multi-million dollar companies have gotten hacked into and data stolen from them. Companies such as Sony, Home Depot, and Premera Blue cross are bigger companies to have their websites broken into. Hackers stole both customers and employee information such as passwords, social security numbers, and emails. In some cases, the hackers made sold the data! It can be lucrative for hackers to break into a website and a great achievement in the community. Companies, on average, spend 1% to 13% of the IT budget on cybersecurity, and even then, the servers can be broken into.

Even celebrities are prone to these cyber attacks. Stars like Tiger Woods or Jennifer Lawrence have had their passwords compromised and leaked. This cause a domino effect of personal information getting out in the open and exposing secret to the public. One of the most prominent recent cases of hackers succeeding is Hillary Clinton’s emails. A Russian hacker group gained access to Hillary Clinton’s email server and leaked it to Wikileaks.

Takeaway on Cyber Attacks and How To Stop Them

Cybersecurity is ever-changing. New technology and hacking technique are being developed by security developers as well as hackers.

It is better to be proactive with your server and website security. Use programs that scan your website for vulnerabilities. Continually patch and update the software you are using. Encrypt sensitive and vital data sent and stored on your site, and one of the easiest steps to securing a website is using complex passwords. These steps implemented collaboratively will help minimize the threat of your website being hacked.