Is your website truly secure?
In today’s digital landscape, where cyber threats are constantly evolving, it’s essential to prioritize website security.
We’ll also immerse into the importance of regularly backing up your website and monitoring any suspicious activity. With the rise in online attacks and data breaches, website security has become a non-negotiable aspect of running a website.
The importance of website security
In this digital age, where everything is becoming more and more digital, the security of your website should be a top priority. A secure website not only protects your data and your users’ information but also helps build trust and credibility with your visitors and customers. With the rise in online attacks and data breaches, website security has become a non-negotiable aspect of running a website.
Website security involves a variety of methods and techniques to protect your website from possible threats. These threats include hacking attempts, malware infections, and brute force attacks. Implementing proper security measures can mitigate website risks and ensure safety and integrity.
Common website security threats
Before we delve into the best practices for website security, let’s look at some common threats that websites face in today’s digital landscape.
Understanding these threats is crucial to protect your website effectively.
1. Malware: It is malicious software that can be inserted into your website’s code, usually Attempting to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information or disrupting the normal functioning of the website is not permitted.
2. Brute force attacks: In a brute force attack, hackers use automated tools to systematically try username and password combinations to gain access to sensitive areas like your website’s admin panel.
3. SQL injection: SQL injection is a technique hackers use to exploit vulnerabilities in a website’s database layer. By injecting malicious SQL queries into user input fields, hackers can gain unauthorized access to the database and potentially extract or modify sensitive data.
4. Cross-site scripting (XSS): XSS attacks occur when malicious scripts are injected into web pages, allowing attackers to steal sensitive information or redirect users to malicious websites.
5. Phishing attacks: Phishing attacks trick users into revealing sensitive information by posing as trustworthy entities, often using social engineering techniques, and can result in identity theft or financial loss.
Understanding website vulnerabilities
To effectively protect your website, it’s important to understand the vulnerabilities that hackers often exploit. You can take the necessary steps to patch these vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of a successful attack by identifying them.
Outdated software: One of the most common vulnerabilities is running outdated software, including your content management system, themes, plugins, and other third-party applications. Hackers often target known vulnerabilities in older versions of software to gain unauthorized access.
Weak passwords: Weak passwords are an open invitation to hackers. Strong, unique passwords for every account are crucial for website security. Weak passwords are easy for hackers to breach.
Lack of encryption: Websites that transmit sensitive data without encryption are vulnerable to interception and data theft. Implementing SSL/TLS certificates and using HTTPS encryption ensures that data transmitted between your website and its visitors remains secure.
Insecure user input fields: User input fields such as contact forms or search boxes can be exploited by hackers to inject malicious code into your website. Implementing input validation and sanitization measures can help prevent these types of attacks.
Essential website security measures
Now that we understand website security threats and vulnerabilities better let’s explore some essential measures you can take to lock down your website and protect it from potential attacks.
Implementing strong passwords and user authentication
Securing your website starts with using strong passwords for all your accounts. Avoid using easily guessable passwords like “password123” or “123456”. Instead, create a strong password with a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Consider adding an extra layer of security to your login process by implementing two-factor authentication (2FA).
Also see: 123456 is Most Common Passwords Used By Millions
Regular website backups and disaster recovery plan
Backing up your website’s files and database regularly can quickly restore it to a previous state if needed.Additionally, having a disaster recovery plan in place ensures you have a clear roadmap for recovering your website in case of a major security incident.
Updating and patching software and plugins
Updating your website’s software, themes, and plugins is essential for maintaining a secure website. Developers frequently release updates to fix code weaknesses and address security vulnerabilities. Regularly updating your software and plugins ensures you’re benefiting from the latest security enhancements.
Securing website forms and contact pages
Hackers often target website forms and contact pages to inject malicious code or harvest sensitive information. Implementing input validation, CAPTCHAs, and form sanitization measures can help prevent these types of attacks. Consider using a web application firewall (WAF) to filter out malicious traffic and protect your forms from abuse.
Monitoring website traffic and suspicious activities
Regularly monitoring your website’s traffic and activity can help you identify suspicious behavior or potential security breaches. Implementing a robust website monitoring system allows you to track and analyze visitor behavior, detect anomalies, and respond quickly to any security incidents.
How Can We Block Common Web Attacks And Protect Our Website Security.
Providing Transport Layer Protection with SSL/TLS.
The primary benefit of transport layer security is the protection of web application data from unauthorized disclosure and modification when it is transmitted between clients (web browsers) and the web application server, and between the web application server and back end and other non-browser based enterprise components.
Also See – How To Become a Web Pentester and Reverse Engineer?
The server validation component of TLS provides authentication of the server to the client. If configured to require client side certificates, TLS can also play a role in client authentication to the server. However, in practice client side certificates are not often used in lieu of username and password based authentication models for clients.
TLS also provides two additional benefits that are commonly overlooked; integrity guarantees and replay prevention. A TLS stream of communication contains built-in controls to prevent tampering with any portion of the encrypted data. In addition, controls are also built-in to prevent a captured stream of TLS data from being replayed at a later time.
It should be noted that TLS provides the above guarantees to data during transmission. TLS does not offer any of these security benefits to data that is at rest. Therefore appropriate security controls must be added to protect data while at rest within the application or within data stores.
Use TLS, as SSL is no longer considered usable for security
- All pages must be served over HTTPS. This includes css, scripts, images, AJAX requests, POST data and third party includes. Failure to do so creates a vector for man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Just protecting authenticated pages with HTTPS, is not enough. Once there is one request in HTTP, man-in-the-middle attacks are possible, with the attackers being able to prevent users from reaching the secured pages.
- The HTTP Strict Transport Security Header must be used and pre loaded into browsers. This will instruct compatible browsers to only use HTTPS, even if requested to use HTTP.
- Cookies must be marked as Secure.
There are three types of vulnerabilities that must be secured for website security.
A: SQL Injection
–>Types
Login Form Bypassing
UNION SQL Injection
Also See- SQL Injection Testing Using SQLMAP
B: Cross Site Scripting
–> Cross Site Request Forgery
Also See- What is Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Attack?
C: File Inclusion
Types-> Remote File Inclusion and Remote Code Execution
On this post i am telling about five types of common web attacks, which are used in most types of defacements or dumps of databases.
The five exploits listed above are SQL injection, XSS, RCE, RFI, and LFI. Most of the time, we missed out some website security code tags.
coz of this we get website attacks and allows the hacker for attack on vulnerable website.
Also Read-
A: SQL Injection
–> LOGIN FORM BYPASSING
Here is an example of the vulnerable code that we can bypass very easily:
index.html file:
<form action="login.php" method="POST" />
<p>Password: <input type="text" name="pass" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Authenticate" /></p>
</form>
login.php file:
<?php
// EXAMPLE CODE
$execute = "SELECT * from database WHERE password = '{$_POST['pass'])";
$result = mysql_query($execute);
?>
We can simply bypass this by using ‘ or ‘1=1’, which will execute “password = ”or ‘1=1”;”.
Alternatively, the user can also delete the database by executing “‘ drop table database; –“.
PREVENTION:
Use mysql_real_escape_string in your php code.
Example:
<?php $badword = "' OR 1 '"; $badword = mysql_real_escape_string($badword); $message = "SELECT * from database WHERE password = "'$badword'"; echo "Blocked " . $message . "; ?>
–> UNION SQL Injection
UNION SQL injection is when the user uses the UNION command. The user checks for the vulnerability by adding a tick to the end of a “.php?id=” file. If it comes back with a MySQL error, the site is most likely vulnerable to UNION SQL injection. They proceed to use ORDER BY to find the columns, and at the end, they use the UNION ALL SELECT command. An example is shown below.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1'
You have an error in your SQL syntax near ” at line 1 SELECT SUM(quantity)
as type FROM orders where (status=’completed’ OR status=’confirmed’ OR status=’pending’) AND user_id=1′
No error--> http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1 ORDER BY 1--
Two columns, and it comes back with an error! This means that there is one column.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=1 ORDER BY 2--
Selects the all the columns and executes the version() command on the only column.
http://www.site.com/website.php?id=-1 UNION SELECT ALL version()--
SOLUTION:
Add something like below to prevent UNION SQL injection.
$evil = "(delete)|(update)|(union)|(insert)|(drop)|(http)|(--)|(/*)|(select)"; $patch = eregi_replace($evil, "", $patch);
B: Cross Site Scripting
Cross site scripting is a type of vulnerability used by hackers to inject code into vulnerable web pages.
If a site is vulnerable to cross site scripting, most likely users will try to inject the site with malicious javascript or try to scam users by creating a form where users have to type their information in.
Two types of XSS (cross site scripting) are persistent XSS and non-persistent XSS.
Example: http://www.site.com/search.php?q=">
SOLUTION
(javascript) (Thank you, Microsoft!):
function RemoveBad(strTemp) {
strTemp = strTemp.replace(/\<|\>|\"|\'|\%|\;|\(|\)|\&|\+|\-/g,"");
return strTemp;
}
C: File Inclusion
Types: Remote File Inclusion/Local File Inclusion, and Remote Code Execution
Remote File Inclusion allows a hacker to include a remote file through a script (usually PHP). This code is mostly patched on websites, but some websites are still vulnerable to the vulnerability. RFI usually leads to remote code execution or javascript execution.
Example of the vulnerable code:
<
Exploiting it would be something like this:
http://www.site.com/page.php?page=../../../../../etc/passwd or http://www.site.com/page.php?page=http://www.site.com/xyz.txt?
SOLUTION:
Validate the input.
$page = $_GET['page'];
$allowed = array('index.php', 'games.php' 'ip.php');
$iplogger = ('ip.php');
if (in_array $page, $pages)) {
include $page {
else
{
include $iplogger
die("IP logged.");
}
For remote code execution, the site would have to have a php executing command. You would patch this by about doing the same thing.
Note: Hope this post will helpful for website security from these types of attacks.