Technology. It’s designed to make our homes more comfortable and workplaces more efficient.
But, every advancement towards realizing a 21st century quality of life comes with a wave of security threats, old and new. The consequences of which are not only born by companies who are the primary targets of cybercrime. Your home systems are more vulnerable than you think.
A web application firewall — also known as a WAF — is basically a website’s gatekeeper. Once installed, it monitors all incoming traffic to determine whether website visitors are legitimate or malicious. It then denies access to suspicious traffic, blocking out nefarious players.
You may think that your small business’s website doesn’t receive enough traffic to necessitate a gatekeeper, but consider this: More than 60% of all internet traffic is made up of bots. Of course, not all bots are dangerous; some serve a positive purpose, such as search engine crawling. But many pose a significant threat to your website and its visitors. These bad bots visit websites for negative purposes — crawling a site’s code in search of security vulnerabilities, for instance.
Joomla! released version 3.9.11 on August 13, 2019, to patch vulnerabilities found within versions 1.6.2 and 3.9.10. This latest security update fixes a vulnerability that allows for mail submission in disabled forms.
Prior to this patch, it was possible for anyone to submit a mail submission to a form even if it was disabled. Com_contact is activated by default in Joomla! installations. This means any user running Joomla! versions 1.6.2-3.9.10 are affected by this vulnerability. With no contacts established or the functionality is disabled, the plugin should not have the ability to send an email, however, with this particular vulnerability it can still send spam emails.
Despite what your lightning-fast Wi-Fi connection may indicate, the internet is not instantaneous. When someone visits your website, it takes time for content such as text, pictures, and videos to travel from the point of origin to wherever the website’s visitor is located. The further apart the two points are, the longer it takes for the content to be delivered.
Content delivery networks exist to expedite this process. Imagine your business is based in Boston and someone visits your website from San Francisco. If the content had to travel completely across the country, the website load time would be extremely long. CDNs improve this process by storing content on servers located throughout the country in data centers called “points of presence.”
The California Gold Rush began in 1848 when James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. Just over 170 years later, we are experiencing a similar rush, only this time it is data being mined, instead of gold. The data gold rush may have had a slower start, but the value to those who are doing the mining is similar.
30% of all malware cleaned by SiteLock’s Expert Services is located inside website databases. With databases housing critical customer data like emails, addresses, and other personal information, we knew we needed to develop a comprehensive solution to keep companies secure. That’s why we launched SMART® Database (SMART/DB™) two years ago, automatically detecting spam or malware found within critical WordPress database tables.
We are excited to announce we are taking database security a step further.
As cyberattacks become increasingly automated, website owners must come to the realization that it might be time to fight fire with fire. Manual detection and removal is becoming increasingly unrealistic — even with the most highly skilled team of cybersecurity specialists at your disposal.
Implementing automated cybersecurity tools is the best way to not only prevent cybersecurity attacks but also reduce the time it takes to identify and contain successful ones — which is a major determinant of the overall cost of a cyberattack. Downtime from a cyberattack can cost small businesses as much as $427 per minute. Automated cybersecurity tools can notify you of an attack as soon as it occurs so you can spring into action.
How do you resolve a cyberattack as quickly and completely as possible? A cyber incident response plan is designed to answer that question. The plan kicks in immediately after an attack and outlines exactly how your company will use its resources to minimize the damage and overcome the incident. In as much detail as possible, it describes who will be involved, what individuals’ roles will be, and which procedures they will need to follow.
A cybersecurity incident response plan is the best way to ensure your business is ready to, well, respond to a successful cyberattack. The most effective plans delegate specific responsibilities to individual team members so that when a hacker strikes, everyone knows his or her next steps.
When building your response plan, the first question you should ask is: “Who should be on the cybersecurity incident response team?”
Website security seals are ultimately about improving two things – trust and sales. And without the first, the second won’t follow. Small businesses with little-known brands always have a tough time persuading new customers that they’re a safe place to do business. And not only that orders will be honored and delivered as promised, but that the site itself is safe. That’s because unsafe sites can be a death-knell for customer trust and confidence, and perhaps even for the business.
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