Securing Your Website

With ongoing security threats, maintaining a website has become more of a laborious task than ever before. Gone are the days where you could just put up a site and be done with it. Today, if you are not actively monitoring your site, you could be susceptible to malicious threats such as DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) and brute-force attacks.

DDOS attacks attempt to overwhelm a site by producing fake hits from multiple locations. With enough hits, the server may exceed its maximum connections to the database causing the site to stop responding. Brute-force attacks try to guess passwords by attempting to log in using every possible combination of numbers and digits. The latter is often unsuccessful due to the large number of possible combinations that would have to be tried but it becomes significantly easier if the intruder knows something about the user. For example, names of family members, pets, birthdays, hobbies, etc.

Both types of threats can be thwarted with firewall and special software like cPHulk. cPHulk prevents brute-force attacks by denying access to a site after a password is incorrectly specified a certain number of times. The downside of using such software is that it is not uncommon for an individual to be locked out of their own site if they accidentally leave cap locks on or forget the password. Firewall software can also be used to prevent malicious IP addresses or IP address ranges from accessing a site and overwhelming system resources. Knowing when to use each is a skill and delicate balancing act that must be learned today in order to survive in an ever more hostile world.