I was enjoying a flight of Belgium beers at the local Yard House with my friend Jayme Check, a business management consultant at Quantum Leap. I was telling him about a new series of website maintenance services we are offering.
The services center on updating and maintaining websites built on WordPress, Magento and Drupal platforms with a focus on protecting small business websites from attacks by hackers. Our new services basically update the website software to the latest version, apply any new security patches, upgrade the plugins and widgets used, and schedule regular backups.
Once a website is using our service, the potential that they will be hacked is greatly reduced.
Jayme was familiar with hacking but didn’t realize that there has been a huge upsurge of compromised websites over the past few years.
In a survey of 583 U.S companies conducted by Ponemon Research on behalf of Juniper Networks, 90% of the respondents said their company computers had been hacked at least once over the past 12 months. Most times the website owner doesn’t even know their website has been hacked.
Then Jayme asked, “If my website looks the same and works ok, why should I care if it’s been hacked?”
Good question! I explained that it’s like having your house broken into but only one room, that you don’t use, has been taken over by a criminal who uses it for nefarious purposes. Even though you don’t see him/her, they can read your mail, steal your private information, distribute and traffic illicit material, open your house to other hackers and basically trash your house right under your nose.
Once a hacker has a foothold in your website, the effort to remove them can range from updating your software and removing the hacked code, to moving your website to another server and completely rebuilding the database and all the site files. The effort required depends to what extent your website has been compromised.
The best solution to combat hackers is to stay current with the latest versions of your website software and plugins, employ good password practices, and back up to another server so you can restore your website in case you have to.
We had two businesses that came to us recently with hacking problems. One didn’t realize they were hacked until we noticed ads for smoking cessation aids hidden in the website code. Fortunately we were able to remove this hidden code in a few hours. The other company was not so lucky. Customers were complaing their website was loading slower and strange characters were appearing on some website pages. This hack was using their server to send out spam. The code had infiltrated their customer database and unfortunately it was quicker to rebuild the website rather than scour through millions of lines of code on a hunt and destroy mission.
With the uptick in hacking, business owners need to be proactive in protecting their online assets and maintaining the privacy of their online data. If you don’t have the time or skills to keep your website software current, Executionists’ website updater services are one solution that will allow you to focus on building your business, rather than hoping the hacker bots don’t find you.
This infographic from Symantec Corp. are a few additional tips to protect your website from security breaches, hacks or privacy infringements:
To request more information for Executionists website update services, contact us for a free website evaluation and security audit.
