subject: Avoid Your Website Getting Hacked [print this page] In this age of affiliate marketing, more and more people are creating their own sites to market products. A website will definitely help you in getting more customers for your products. Your website also grabs the attraction of hackers to play around. So the website should be secure enough so that the data and other details linked to them are safe. We can see that hacks are possible in almost all the programming languages. With little care, you can protect your site and your online identity.
Out of different hacking methods, the most common type is the Cross site scripting (XSS). This can be carried out in various methods - DOM-based, stored or reflected. Its better to understand how we can secure websites from hacks than trying to figure out what these hacks are. Ensuring the validation of all the inputs to your site is the best way to protect your website. Inputs like page headers, cookies, query string, hidden fields used on forms and other forms fields should be validated. These inputs should be validated against expected input types and length. The input to the web forms should be HTML encrypted in-order to avoid any unwanted script elements.
The second hacking technique is the Google hacking. We know how many tools are available for webmasters to track and analyze website rankings. Google tops the list of search engines. Google hacking is the hacking techniques by which hackers gains access to unauthorized information through advanced search queries. They keep searching for websites using special characters, logical operators etc. to find some critical data. It is pretty easy for them to get access to such data/pages, though webmasters might have kept it isolated. One solution for this is to maintain a robots.txt file and update regularly. Specify pages and control which all documents on a particular site should be indexed by the search engine spiders.
Also, try to avoid any storage of sensitive data on the server.
Here are some important points for you to make your website secure. Your files are important, so protect them with passwords. E-mail address has to be secured, e-mail addresses are not supposed to leave anywhere. Secure your source code, see if software patches are available and sign up for the updates. Add a robot.txt to your website. For the uploaded files, check the permissions you have set. Check for old and unwanted files and delete them. Know your server and secure it with an updated antivirus.
