The Five Functions of Web Security
In the era of cloud, mobility and greater reliance on the internet, great strides in connectivity have allowed your employees and customers to collaborate, communicate and access information with unprecedented ease. Unfortunately, those same benefits have opened your organization up to a wider attack surface. This makes it more important than ever to employ the right web security protections.
Effective cybersecurity protects against attacks that exploit flaws in your website’s infrastructure, applications and data systems. These tools help stop malware and ransomware, block phishing domains and restrict use of credentials, among other things. While you can’t eliminate every risk, a multi-layered approach to web security gives you the best chance of protecting your people, assets and brand.
The Five Functions of Web Security
Cyber threats continue to evolve. Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are particularly problematic for organizations because they attack infrastructure through multiple vulnerabilities, creating backdoors and spreading across networks. As a result, they’re nearly impossible to detect and contain. Effective preventative web security includes strategies that help stop these threats, including periodic vulnerability testing and code reviews, ensuring your authentication system is working properly, securing email and other communication channels with strong encryption and using passwords, limiting access to sensitive information, and keeping abreast of latest risks and vulnerabilities.
The most common threat vectors for a compromised web server include:
Automated Bot Attacks: These are carried out by attackers who use readily available scripts to launch a variety of attacks, often in just a fraction of the time it would take an attacker to execute them manually. They can target any type of attack, from stealing sensitive data to hijacking user sessions.
Injection Attacks: When attackers inject malformed SQL statements into a vulnerable database, they can change or delete data, and even escalate privileges on the targeted database server. They’re also used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where hackers flood servers or networks with traffic to make them unusable for days at a time and impact revenue and business continuity.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Attackers introduce malicious scripts into websites via unprotected user input fields on web pages. This allows attackers to steal data, hijack sessions and perform a variety of other illicit activities. To prevent XSS vulnerabilities, it’s important to sanitize any user input that can be interpreted as instructions by the server code, such as POST or GET parameters. This process is usually handled by web frameworks, but can be done by hand as well.
A secure website is one that uses an SSL certificate to encrypt communications between the web browser and the web server. You can tell a website is secure by looking for the lock icon and “https” in the URL bar of your web browser. It’s also a good idea to check that the certificate is issued by a trusted provider, such as Comodo or Thawte. You should always be wary of any site that appears to offer a free SSL certificate.