We have been getting new clients lately due to their websites getting hacked, or attempted hacks. Here are some things you should know about that:
1. Hacking Occurs on Popular Platforms
You will find that most “cheap hosts” out there which oversell their services are the ones most vulnerable to hacking. This is because with so many accounts, the hackers are bound to find vulnerable sites. Your website represents your business, now more than ever, so don’t host in the bullseye of a target. This would be like building a brick and mortar store in a flood zone. It will be destroyed, it’s just a matter of time.
2. They almost all come from Asia
The effective ones anyway. With audit trails and logging so widely available to you, if your web host is worth their salt, that is, it’s easy to track where the attempt originated, geographically. 99% of the time it comes from Asia. It’s easy to combat this by blocking access at the firewall. If your business doesn’t do any commerce with China, Indonesia, etc., then blocking Asia from your website, not only makes you invisible to them, impervious to hacking, but also has a side effect of a giant reduction in SPAM!
3. Your host probably has old software
Hackers are always finding vulnerabilities in WordPress, PHP, CentOS/Linux Operating systems, etc. Cheap hosts give you what they give you and that’s that. They do not keep their software patched and up to the latest versions for security. Keeping everything up to date, and using best practices will greatly reduce the prospect that your site will be hacked.
4. There is no 100% Effective Hack Preventative
If the SEC, FBI, CIA, etc can get hacked, so can you. You are not immune. You can however reduce this risk to almost guarantee it won’t happen to you. Our hosting over the years has been hacked so much, that with experience and time, we’ve now got a recipe that has rendered us and all of our clients hack-free for over 2 years.
- We are not on a cheap, oversold system
- We keep our server way underutilized so there are never too many hosts per server
- We use firewalls and subscribe to services that alert us of IP addresses and regions from which hacking attacks are originating, and we block them
- We use the latest tools and software
- We always use best practices for security
- We provide a ridiculous amount of backup so just in case a hack DOES happen, we can restore to where you were prior very quickly, and then are easily able to analyze where it came from and where the vulnerability was.