Easy Website Security Check That Everybody Should DO

Easy Website Security Check That Everybody Should DO

Simple Security: Things to Check on Your Website

You've heard about it in the news White House has been a target for hacking. The Pentagon, Home Depot, and Marriott recently indicated that they were targeted for being hacked. Even Target was a target for being hacked so nobody is immune. 


Even sites like WordPress which is the most popular CRM  website designing tool out on the internet can be hacked. Recently, 1.5 million “unpatched” which means out-of-date sites were hacked so it's something you want to take care of. 


So the big question is, is your website safe?

Why have a Safe Website?

 Typically, people want to make money on their website right that's why it's there. It's either directly an e-commerce site or it's something that you want them to call for business purposes. So when your website is hacked you're not going to make money. So it's important that nobody ever goes to your website and finds you in Google, Bing, or Yahoo and they see a warning saying “this site may be attacked”. They're probably going to click that first button that says “get me out of here”. So it's not good at all and your business may suffer.

What happens if your site gets hacked? They will:

  • “Take Your Site” and you can no longer access it 
  • Infect the visitors to your site with Malware
  • Add unknown links to your website
  • Put up inappropriate images
  • Divert the money to THEIR account
  • Send your web traffic to another website

 What Makes a Website Safe?

There's actually a 100-point checklist to consider when looking at the overall security of the website. Some of them are more important than others but some of them really are considered to be a requirement.

These are the top three:

  • Local considerations
  • Hosting aspects 
  • Site settings 

    • Local considerations

    Just like charity starts at home, security starts at home. So is your personal computer that you're using safe? Are you running an antivirus? You should have a malware checker to make sure that you don't have something. Most of the time these two work together and they both do bad things on your computer. 


    “You might have a keystroke logger on your computer which means that when you go to a site and you log in it's capturing everything that you type and sending it to the hacker. When you go to log into your email they know what your username and password are. If you're logging into your bank they get that information as well.”
    -Paul Taubman

    Don’t use the same password for everything, because if you're using your email and your bank and they get a hold of that they can change your password to the bank, and then they can also get access to your email to confirm that you wanted to change and now you are locked out. Make sure that your password is strong and ugly, after all, you could be the weakest link so always make sure that your passwords are secure.

    Hosting aspects

    Not all hosting is the same so depending on where you're hosting your website you need to take precautions about how hard and how secure their servers are. Make sure that it's a good and secured host.

    Website security check

    Site settings


    If you let anybody build your website but they're not taking all of the security into consideration, that’s going to be a problem.  Do you have security on your site? Think about it. If it's WordPress, Joomla or Drupal it doesn't matter. Make sure you have something installed there. Passwords should be strong. Periodically check for users to see who's on it. The worst thing you can do is have a username of “admin” because that's the most hacked user account. 


    KEY TAKEAWAYS


    So these are three important things to consider: your computer, your hosting, and then site settings.

    Take a look at those and then finally make sure your software is up to date because if it's out of date that's when it becomes vulnerable.

    If you'd like a complimentary website audit head over to digitalmaestro.com/webaudit.


    ABOUT PAUL TAUBMAN II

    Paul Taubman II

    As the Chief Online Strategist of Digital Maestro, Paul B. Taubman, II has his roots deep in the world of technology. Working as a Solutions Architect at Fortune 500 companies for over 25 years, Paul knows how to get systems to talk to each other and share data.

     Get to know Paul Taubman II more! 


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