Website Hardening
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Website Hardening
If You Want To Make Your Website Security More Robust, You Need To Think About Hardening. To Harden, Your Website Means To Add Different Layers Of Protection To Reduce The Potential Attack Surface.
Here's the list of what can be provided:
- Bruteforce attack protection
- Firewall Implementation
- Login Security
- SQL Injection prevention
- Captcha on contact forms
- Avoiding directory listings and information leakage
- Disallowing execution of malicious files in irrelevant files and folders
- Implementation of directory level htaccess files
- Implementation of secret key
- DDOS attack protection
Website Hardening Tips
Website Hardening means adding layers of protection to reduce the risk of website attacks, a process known as “defense in depth.”
Here are our top 10 virtual hardening principles:
1. Keep your website updated
Every piece of software required to run your application needs to be kept up to date with the latest patches and security updates. Website vulnerabilities come in all shapes and sizes, so updating your CMS and any third-party components like plugins, themes, and extensions is essential.
Don’t neglect your server, Apache, and PHP. They also need to be up to date. Keeping everything updated reduces the prospects of having vulnerabilities endanger your website.
2. Reduce the surface of attack
Only allow public access to public areas of your application. Deny everything else by default. Search and harden your website access points.
It can be accomplished with server configuration rules, setting file and folder permissions, and using a web application firewall.
3. Use input sanitization techniques
Specify precisely what kind of data you expect from the user:
- Is it supposed to accept special characters?
- Should it allow only numbers or letters, too? What is the maximum length or size?
Never trust the user and always accurately filter what is sent to your application. Accidental damage can be just as harmful as intentional damage.
4. Remove unnecessary extensions
The higher the number of dependencies, the greater the risk of an attack. Each additional code in your application is a potential gateway for an attacker.
5. Have granular permission control
Restrict what each team member can do and make sure they don’t have more privileges than necessary. Granting every user administrative access is a security hazard that can be mitigated with appropriate permissions.
If you have an author or editor contributing to your website, they should not need administrator privileges.
6. Use multi-factor authentication
Restricted areas need restricted access levels. The best way to guarantee that the person accessing something is not an attacker is to ask for a token after the initial authentication method (usually a password), precisely what 2FA tools do.
7. Use secure passwords
Enforce a minimum level of strength for passwords and set an expiration date, so passwords are always strong and fresh.
Use password management tools to simplify the use of strong, unique passwords.
8. Allow secure access only
Prevent direct access from public hotspots by allowing access to restricted areas only when using a secure channel such as a VPN or proxy. Make sure all administrators are accessing from safe devices.
All applications should be accessed over HTTPS — ensuring all traffic is encrypted, quickly confirmed by checking for an unbroken padlock.
9. Reduce verbosity and exposure to information
Instead of “Your password is incorrect,” change to “Login credentials invalid.” This kind of reduced verbosity can diminish the chance of a successful brute force attack by introducing doubt about whether the username is correct.
Must not write Sensitive data to application logs, and these logs cannot be publicly accessible. Using an internal error code can reduce the amount of information displayed while allowing easy debugging.
10. Monitor your website and keep up with its log activity
Check for anomalies in your website logs to detect important information concerning application misconfiguration, malfunctions, attack attempts, and other necessary status information.
The Ultimate Hardening Tip – Use a Web Application Firewall
Fix Hacked Site offers a Website Application Firewall that hardens your website by default. Every site under the Fix Hacked Site Firewall is already hardened. The Fix Hacked Site team can apply vulnerability-agnostic patches to any website with virtual hardening.
Once you activate the firewall, you won’t need to worry as much about maintaining security plugins and configurations. However, you will still need to practice good security habits like passwords and privileges. Having a website security team to count on will save you time and money and give you peace of mind to focus on your business.
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My website was vulnerable to those who seek to invade and I fortunately discovered the Fixhackedsite website. The team quickly secured me from the predators and suggested a few changes to my site. Frankly my site was a bit drab and non-engaging so I had the team rebuild it and I couldn’t be happier. The site is now looking like it belongs in 2022 and is secure – very satisfied with the service and expertise. My business is relatively small but ticking along nicely with good activity from the contact form and turnover is increasing. Fixhackedsite now fully maintain my site and host it – highly recommend their services.
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https://bamboovandiemen.com.au
Owner/Manager
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I can’t say enough good things about Fixhackedsite web design and hosting. I’ve been working with Fixhackedsite for 2 years and they are the best in the business. They do excellent work at an unbelievable price, and are always available to help with any problems that come up. I’m a small business owner, so I don’t have a huge budget for my marketing needs, but I get more leads than ever before and I’m always happy to refer them to my friends for their website design needs.
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Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
It’s probably not targeted at your site. Websites frequently run the same software as countless others, and hackers will find vulnerabilities that they can exploit en masse.
A fixed fee of $77. Additionally, you can get the clean included in our monthly maintenance plan (from $37/mo). Or, if you would like us to live scan your site for malware every day, this is only $3 a month! Check out our pricing page now.
Yes, we are here all day, every day. We maintain and monitor sites for customers too, which means we need to be available in case of emergencies or urgent updates.
When we have the logins we need, you can leave us to it. We’ll email you when we have an update.
If your website shared hosting space with another site (for instance, in one cPanel account), this could be the reason. It’s unlikely that the web host has a problem, but it’s not unheard of.
Once you place an order utilizing the button above, a thread will be started with our engineers. They’ll gather any more information we need from you and keep you updated on the task status.
We are an international team of highly experienced website malware removal specialists, primarily based in the US, UK, and the Philippines, perfectly placed to work across all time zones to fix your site as fast as possible so you can get back to business.
Yes, please call us on 0844 995 1012
If you have a backup, then yes, rollback. However, you need to fix the underlying vulnerability. Likewise, beware that a hack can lie dormant for some time before its effects become visible.