How Secure is Your Website? The 5 Important Questions You Should be Asking
Security threats are always lurking, whether or not you’re aware of their presence. According to Forbes, 30,000 websites are hacked each day, and no organization or industry is safe: 55 percent of retail trade websites, 50 percent of health care/ social assistance websites, and 35 percent of finance/ insurance websites are vulnerable to at least one attack every day of the year.
Over the next few weeks we will be presenting a series of blogs, which highlight different kinds of website attacks and the security features that can protect you against these threats. To ensure your website’s security, you should consider the following five questions:
1. Can Your Website be Found?
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the primary directory service of the Internet. DNS security and availability problems can prevent users from finding your website or can allow cyber attackers to redirect your users to an entirely different and potentially malicious site. You need a high-performing, reliably available, secure and global DNS service, to ensure that users can ALWAYS find your website.
2. Is Your Website Available?
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks occur when a massive amount of requests are sent to overwhelm the servers and crash your website. Because DDoS attacks are unpredictable and come in many forms, it is important to have a thorough defense against these attacks so that your website continues to serve your legitimate users.
3. Are Your Web Applications Secured?
Your public websites are vulnerable to a variety of attacks including SQL injection (SQLi) and cross-site scripting (XSS). Hackers can leverage these attacks to impact your online business and reputation by causing data breaches and website defacement. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) can protect against these attacks by monitoring all traffic to your website and by blocking malicious requests.
4. Is Your Content Secure?
Your customers are making purchases, doing financial transactions and sharing personally identifiable information over the internet. Cyber attackers are looking to intercept and gain unauthorized access to this information. Encryption is necessary for content protection as it prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, eavesdropping, tampering and malware injection between your website and users. Thus, deterring attackers from gaining access to sensitive business and consumer information.
5. Is Your Origin Protected?
Many websites harbor highly sensitive information such as credit card numbers. Cyber attackers go straight to the source, by attacking the website’s origin servers to steal information. You need a secure content delivery network (CDN) to direct traffic through a PoP (point of presence) rather than straight to your website, in order to prevent direct-to-origin attacks.
Don’t Wait, Secure Your Website Today
Verizon Digital Media Services’ CDN provides you with confidence in knowing that your website can stand up against malicious cyber attacks and address important security considerations. Our comprehensive security solution combines our Anti-DDoS software, WAF, IP Anycast DNS, Data Encryption and Origin Cloaking to secure your website and ensure a high level of performance.
Our security blog series will show you how each of these security features can help you address the five main concerns regarding website security.
Can your website be found? Check back next week to make sure your answer is a resounding “yes!” with our DNS service that leverages our global IP Anycast network.
