How to Secure any Website from Hackers? Expert Tips

Last Updated on 3 months by Touhid

Website security refers to the protection of websites from cyber attacks. Website security protects your website from different types of cyber threats such as malware, DDoS attacks, and SQL injection. In this article, we will discuss helpful tips on how to secure any website from hackers.

If your website is not secured then hackers or cyber criminals may hack your website and you will lose your information and traffic, which will impact your business. So, it is very important to know how to secure your website from hackers.

How to Secure Any Website?

The vulnerable websites can be attacked anytime and anywhere. So, website security is important to protect your sensitive information and the reputation of your business. Here, are some useful tips on how to secure any website or application from attackers.

1. Use Strong Password
2. Use SSL Certificate
3. Select Reputable Website Hosting Service Provider
4. Keep Up To Date Your Website
5. Back-Up Your Site
6. Scan Your Website Regularly
7. Sign Out From Your Website
8. Install Web Application Firewall
9. Don’t Allow File Uploads On Your Site
10. Install Security Plugins
11. Never Open Suspicious Email
12. Change Admin Folders Name
13. Protect From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks
14. Protect From SQL Injection Attacks
15. Keep a Secure Web Server
16. Keep a Secure Database Server

1. Use Strong Password

This is the first tips for how to secure any website. To secure a website you should use unique and strong passwords for your website admin access, database, and web server. Never use an easy and simple password because these types of passwords can be compromised by hackers very easily.

So, create a strong password to secure a website using letters, numbers, and special characters, and should change the password regularly.

Tips

• The password should contain uppercase letters (A – Z), lowercase letters (a – z), numbers (0 – 9)
• Special character (@, #, $, %, ^, (,), &, *!) and
• The password length should be at least 10 characters long.
• Example: R#6^9gL@9%Dis a strong password and standard password for your website.

2. Use SSL Certificate

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer is a global standard security protocol that ensures that your website is secure. SSL creates a secure connection between a website and a web browser. It ensures that all information passed between a web server and a browser remains encrypted and secure.

So, you should immediately purchase an SSL certificate for your website from a reputable service provider.  Here, the top and most reliable SSL certificate providers are as follows:

• Symantec
• VeriSign
• GeoTrust
• Comodo
• GoDaddy

Tips

If your website is secured by an SSL certificate then a padlock is displayed on the address bar and shows the URL as HTTPS instead of HTTP.

• Such as https://cyberthreatportal.com/ instead of https://cyberthreatportal.com/

3. Select Reputable Website Hosting Service Provider

If someone asks me how to secure a website? I will suggest to him, first select a reputable web service provider, who can provide you with the best security for your website.

So, selecting a reputable web hosting service provider is very important to secure any website or web-based application.

Before hosting a website, you should ask the service provider about their security mechanism, backup policy, website availability, and other tools they will use.

So, you have to select a reputable hosting service provider who has market experience and can guarantee the maximum availability of your website.

There are some best website hosting service providers where you can host your website such as:

1. GoDaddy
2. Namecheap
3. Bluehost
4. HostGator
5. DreamHost

4. Keep Up To Date Your Website

How to improve website security? To improve and protect website from intruders, make sure your website, plugins, operating system, security, and scripts are up to date. If your website’s software, security, web service and scripts are not updated then a hacker may take advantage of your website.

If you are using content management system such as WordPress, then ensure that your WordPress are the most updated version. Whenever an update version of WordPress is available, install it immediately.

5. Back Up Your Site

This is very important tips for your website security to take back up regularly. It will ensure that you can restore your website quickly whenever your site becomes inaccessible or your data has lost or has been hacked or malware infected.

Typically, your web hosting service provider will take backups of your website of their own servers. But it is better if you take backup your website files and database regularly to a secondary storage or any others external device.

6. Scan Your Website Regularly

To secure any website from malware attacks, you should scan your website and server regularly for potential vulnerabilities and malware.

There are number of scanning tools on the internet that you can use to detect vulnerabilities on your website and protect from different type’s malware.

The security tools used for website or application are as follows:

• Scan My Server
• SUCURI
• Acunetix
• Netsparker
• SQLMap
• W3af
• Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)
• Kali
• Sqlninja
• OpenSSL
• Hydra

7. Sign Out From Your Website

Signing out from a website or software is very important because it helps to prevent unauthorized access. When you have finished your work, you should always sign out even if you are using your own computer.

Your website must have a session management script that will automatically sign out after a certain amount of time of no activity.

8. Install Web Application Firewall

A web application firewall or WAF is an application-based cyber security tool that is designed to protect websites and applications by filtering, monitoring, and blocking HTTP malicious traffic (e.g. Malware attack).

How to secure any website from malware attacks? To secure a website from malicious attacks you should use a web application firewall, which will protect your websites, apps, and the data.

Here is the list of some commercially used Web Application Firewalls:

• Fortinet FortiWeb
• Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall
• F5 Advanced WAF
• Radware AppWall
• Symantec WAF
• Barracuda WAF
• Imperva WAF
• Sophos XG Firewall
• SonicWall NSa

9. Don’t Allow File Uploads On Your Site

If you allow people to upload their files to your website, then the website automatically creates security vulnerabilities. The attacker may upload malicious script to your web server which will harm your website.

In that case, there has a chance to infect your website with malware attacks.

Tips

• You can provide your email address to your website’s “contact” page so that user can send their files via email rather than uploading to your website.
• Then, you need to scan the files before opening them using professional anti-virus software such as Norton, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Panda, ESET, Avast, and AVG.

10. Install Security Plugin

If your website is based on a content management system such as WordPress, then you can improve your website with security plugins. In WordPress, several security plugins provide additional security from website hacking.

Here is the list of some security plugins for WordPress websites:

• iThemes Security
• Wordfence Security
• Bulletproof Security
• All In One WP Security & Firewall

11. Never Open Suspicious Email

If you receive an email from unknown source which seems suspicious e-mail, then don’t open it. A suspicious e-mail may contains a virus or malware script which can compromise your website security.

So, to secure a website you will never open that type of email and don’t download the infected email attachment.

12. Change Admin Folders Name

The sensitive folder name of website is “admin” or “root“, which is very convenient to use. If you don’t change the folder name then hacker can able to access your website files.

So, change the folder name of your website such as “New Folder (5)” or “account” which is very difficult to access for attackers.

13. Protect From Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks

Cross-site scripting is a web security vulnerability and client-side code injection attack which executes malicious scripts in a web browser.

A hacker finds a way to inserts malicious JavaScript code into your website, which can change the content of your website and steals sensitive information.

If you want to secure your website then you have to protect from Cross-site scripting attacks. Here are the some tips on how to protect from Cross-site scripting attacks

• Install Firewalls
• Sanitize your input data
• Escaping user input data
• Validating Input data

14. Protect From SQL Injection Attacks

SQL injection is the most common website hacking techniques used by hacker to control a website database to steal or damage the data such as passwords, credit card details, or personal user information.

In this technique, the attacker places the malicious script in SQL query, via web page input. It is occurs when a website or application fails to properly sanitize the SQL statements, so attacker can insert their own malicious SQL statements to access the database.

How to secure any website from SQL injection attacks? To protect from SQL injection attacks, you can apply the following prevention methods:

• Use of Prepared Statements
• Use a Web Application Firewall
• Updating your system
• Validating user input
• Limiting privileges
• Use Stored Procedures

A. Use of Prepared Statement

Prepared Statements is one of the best ways to prevent SQL injection attack which ensure that an attacker is not able to change the query, even if SQL commands are inserted by a hacker.

For example, if you’re using MySQLi in PHP then the code will be:

1. $username = $_POST[“username”];
2. $password = $_POST[“password”];
3. $query = “SELECT * FROM user WHERE user.username = ? AND user.password = ?”;
4. $stmt = $mysqli->prepare ($query)
5. $stmt->bind_param(‘s’,$username);
6. $stmt->bind_param(‘s’,$ password);
7. $stmt->execute();
8. $result = $stmt->get_results();

B. Use Web Application Firewall

In order to protect from SQL injection attack you can use a web application firewall or WAF which can detect and prevent SQL injections.

It has designed to secure a website and application by filtering, monitoring, and blocking HTTP malicious traffic (e.g. Malware attack).

C. Updating your system

If a website or application has vulnerabilities then a hacker can exploit the system using SQL injection. So, to protect from SQL injection attack you have to apply patches and updates your system with latest version.

15. Keep Secure Web Server

A Web Server is another important component of web infrastructure which is responsible for hosting a Web site and its related files and services. A  Web server administrator should perform the following tasks to keep secure any website.

• Keep up to date the Operating System
• Enable the security feature of  Web Server
• Remove unnecessary services
• Disable remote access
• Install and monitor web application firewall
• Install SSL certificate
• Ensure dedicated servers for website
• Keep separate user logins

16. Keep Secure Database Server 

You should ensure the security of your database server in order to protect a website or application from unauthorized access. A person such as database administrator should perform the following tasks to secure a website.

• Use dedicated database server
• Ensure data encryption
• Secure login credentials
• Ensure secure data access
• Store and monitor database logs files

Conclusion

Finally, website security is important for website owner because if a website is hacked then it will loses the data with maximum traffic. In this post, we have given some best tips on how to secure any website from attackers or unauthorized access.