The bad guys really are out there. They hammer away on web servers all over the world, day and night looking for a way to exploit the inattentive and the unaware. They try to lure you into clicking an email link or opening an attachment or otherwise infecting your PC with malware. To avoid becoming a victim, there are website security steps you must take to protect your website and those of others from hackers and other Internet criminals.

Some Examples

Problems with hacked web sites can lead to costly upgrades or rebuilds, legal liability and lost business. Let's take a look at a few examples of problems we have seen recently amongst our own clients and others.

• A Joomla site was hacked and a virus applied to all pages. When visitors came to the site, their personal computer could be infected if they were unaware of the danger. The 111 Web Studio systems team identified the problem and damage was so severe and the site was so outdated that a complete rebuild was required.
• An admin password was compromised on a customer's personal computer through an exploit that has not yet been determined. The result was that a hacker was able to steal login credentials and log into the client's website admin and grab sensitive information.
• A Joomla site was hacked and used to send out enormous quantities of spam. Our systems people identified and stopped the flow of mail from the site. In this case, just a version upgrade was required and that is what was implemented.
• 160,000 WordPress sites were recently used in a DDoS attack because they were not upgraded to a new version of WordPress. See our recent blog article on this subject.
• The breach of credit card information from 110 Million Target customers apparently started with a email phishing scheme directed at a Target vendor. The scheme installed malware on the vendor's computers allowing the hacker to steal login credentials to Target's systems.

What You Can Do

You can protect yourself and your website against problems like these by using good security practices both on-line and on your personal computer. Best practices include:

• Create sound passwords - Not a word, not easily guessed based on user information, include special characters and numbers, mix upper and lower case letters, make it 10 characters if possible.
• Keep local machines secure and virus free - Use anti virus software and have a security expert audit your in-house systems periodically.
• Watch out for email - If you didn't ask for it, be suspicious. Don't open attachments or click on links unless you know what you are opening.
• Update online applications - Update the code you are using to the current versions for online software like Joomla, WordPress, message board and blogging software, shopping cart software, etc. Fortunately for Build111 and Church111 customers, we take care of security updates for you.

We'll provide more information on these topics in future articles, but if you have a question about your web site or a problem you'd like us to help with, please contact us or give us a call at (877) 397-7605.