Unprofessional Website Maintenance Carries A Significant Risk

If you try and cut corners in the interest of saving money

, you can often wind up with significant and unforeseen problems as a direct consequence. Be very careful when establishing your website and understand that you have quite a lot at stake should something go wrong and e-criminals hack into your site. Always make sure that you keep up with your website maintenance, or you could end up with egg on your face, as in the case of the Centre for Alternative Technology, a sustainable charity and tourist attraction in mid-Wales.

The Centre is quite open about the problems they faced, even though, in their own words, they found the issue to be very embarrassing. Ultimately, their website was infiltrated by cyber criminals who used the site as a resource allowing them to engage in criminal activities. The problem arose when the Centre downloaded some open source software, which happened to have a significant security hole within. This allowed criminals to access the site and to write information directly to the Centre's webspace. Initially this was very difficult to detect as the Centre's data was unaffected and on the face of it there appeared to be nothing wrong. However, what most people do not realise is that they could be found liable, financially, as a consequence of this activity within their site. The Centre was also particularly worried that its reputation could be vulnerable. Essentially, the management should have updated the software as and when updates were issued by the developer, as normally such updates include patches and other "fixes," helping to close any security loophole, for example.

In another case, a well known organisation had decided to cut costs by finding less than competent web designers to work on their site and they also opted to use the very cheapest hosting provider available, without checking reputations. They were in for a nasty shock as they had a visit from the police, who informed them that illegal drugs were being sold right from their website. They were able to confirm this immediately by conducting a Google search to see that dozens of illegal drugs were in fact being sold from the domain that they were responsible for. In this case the installation files were not removed when the website was constructed and the criminals were able to access the database to install a number of different drug advertisements. The major search engines "cached" these pages, which means that they remained available for searchers for a period of up to 90 days. Consequently, for a three-month period this particular organisation risked significant reputational damage and all because they had failed to implement even the most basic level of security governance.

Cautionary tales indeed and a reason why you should make sure that you have strict policies and procedures in place to help cover every eventuality and to protect your business. You don't want to end up like these organisations. Protect your web presence just as avidly as you would your bricks and mortar property.

by: Sarah Dougan

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