A lot of companies experience a variety of security breaches first before they take website security seriously. Keeping your website safe and up-to-date involves a lot of safety precautions. One of the most important reasons why website security measures must be set up before a security breach is the fact that it doesn’t require a huge amount of money to be done effectively.
An effective way of protecting your website from all the threats is to be proactive and defensive. Recognize all the website security vulnerabilities and find a way to prevent it from becoming a threat.
Here are the most common website security vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.
1. Injection Flaws
Website injection flaws let the attackers input dangerous codes to your system by using a different application. This usually happens when your system fails to filter an untrusted input. Anything your site receives from suspicious sources must always be filtered.
When hackers bypass your server and attach your website, it may include system calls, use of your external programs, and calls to backend databases with the use of SQL injections. A lot of malicious codes can be injected to your website if you do not pay attention to the security precautions for websites.
In order to protect your site from this vulnerability, you can filter your input properly and be mindful whether the input can be trusted or not. Make sure to filter all of the inputs properly, because failing to filter even one dangerous input can cause serious problems for your site such losing data, leaking of sensitive information, and execution of administrative operations.
2. Security Misconfiguration
If the security for your website is not properly configured, any attacker can easily have access to all of your website’s data and functions. Security misconfigurations may be caused by using outdated software, running unnecessary services on the machine, and many more.
The best way to avoid this website security vulnerability is to make sure that the structure of your website is secured and has a good component separation.
3. Broken Authentication
Your website creates a session ID and cookie for every valid session. These session IDs and cookies carry sensitive information that can be used against your website. When the session ends and you fail to invalidate the cookies, the data will remain in your system. This can easily become a threat to your website security and be used by any hacker to gain access to your website’s sensitive information.
The easiest way to get rid of this website security vulnerability is to use a secure framework. Use a framework to build unique features in your website and let you know all of the threats you need to avoid to maintain the security of your website.
4. Sensitive Data Exposure
This type of vulnerability is focused on resource protection. Sensitive data and information in your website must always be encrypted and secure. If you have your customers’ personal details such as credit card information, accounts, and passwords, this information must always be encrypted and the hashing algorithm must be strong.
Having sensitive data stored in your system can sometimes be hard to protect. What you need to do is lower the exposure. If there is certain data that you don’t need, do not keep it. If the data stored is important and necessary to your application, make sure that it is safe and encrypted. Don’t forget to save the encryption key along with all the data that needs protecting.
5. Missing Function Level Access Control
This website security vulnerability is all about authorization. Whenever a function is called on the server it must be done with proper authorization. Most programmers simply rely on the fact that the server generates the user interface and assume that it will not be accessible to anyone. Wrong. Hackers can simply override this measure through forging requests and gain access to the server functionalities.
Preventing this vulnerability is simple, authorization must always be done on the server side. There must be no exceptions and carelessness, because it will cause a serious problem for your website.
6. Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting focuses on the script that is accessible only on the user’s side. It allows the hackers to run scripts on your browser and take over the website. This usually happens when an application sends suspicious data to the browser without any validation. This will give the attacker the advantage to take over the session cookies or even sabotage the user’s experience and redirect them to malicious sites.
The best solution to this is an enhanced website security. Never return HTML tags to a certain client, whitelist all the input fields, or use an effective input and output encoding for a safer browser.
Knowing how to secure a website is important. To make sure that your site is 100% safe from attackers, it is best to work with professionals like Advanced Digital Media who can provide you with up-to-date website security systems. With our team of experts, you are sure to have a safe space to store all of your sensitive data. Learn more about our web development service now. Call us!
