Website Security – An Overview
Website Security is not just a word but a serious issue to look for. Nowadays everything is connected to the web and literally, you can do whatever you wish through the web like marketing, advertising, selling, purchasing, getting solutions, learning, working, earning, fund transactions, etc. Almost all the needs of people are catered through the web. At present, we are having almost one billion. Day by day web technology is evolving and so does website-based frauds and attacks. Modern-day attacks are very sophisticated making it very difficult for us to find and thus results in serious data loss or monetary loss for a single person or the organization. So to avoid such kind of serious disaster you have to make sure that you are secured i.e. your web environment is secured.
Website security is not that simple to categorize as there are a lot of factors to look into and to be taken care of. Because in the Information Security world, it is quoted that “100% Security is a myth.” You can’t be 100% secured but at the same time, you can’t leave your site without taking any security measures or precautions. A website being hacked or compromised or data being stolen is not only causing damage to the site but also to the organization as a whole. Because people from outside get an impression about your organization by going through your website. Therefore website security must be taken into serious consideration.
There are many ways to secure a site like
- Secure Coding
- Validating the user inputs
- Firewall configuration
- Using load balancer
- Updating the software regularly and much more
The above alone are not the ways to secure a website but are few among many other factors of website security. Following OWASP’s suggestion is one of the best practices to secure websites.
How to know whether your site is secured or not?
Once your site has been developed you have to scan it using a website vulnerability scanner as most of the scanners will scan and produce a report for you along with the recommendation. Usually, we can’t say that the scanner result alone is fine as there are certain limitations for the scanner to test a website. So to have an accurate report or let’s say to know about almost all the security vulnerabilities present in your site you have to go for Website Penetration Testing. Never rely on Automated testing alone. Manual Penetration Testing will let you know how much the site is vulnerable in real-world usage. The reason is in manual Penetration Testing the testers will use the real-world hacking techniques that are used by underground hackers but rather in a secured and safe way without affecting the Web Application Environment.
When to conduct website penetration testing?
Website Penetration Testing should be conducted at regular intervals as hackers are creating new kinds of sophisticated attacks day by day. Basically, it was recommended to conduct yearly Penetration Testing. But it is good if you conduct quarterly testing. Whenever you make a change, changes like Server update or OS update or Framework update, etc in your web application environment then definitely you should conduct a full Web Penetration Testing. This is one of the best practices of website security.