Web Security Best Practices
Web security protects your site from some of the most common internet threats, like data breaches, malware infections and denial-of-service attacks. This is achieved through preventative technologies that detect vulnerabilities and harden environments. These include penetration testing, automated vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management tools. These can also be integrated into issue trackers, CI/CD systems and developer tools to streamline remediation, satisfy compliance requirements and minimize false positives.
Hackers are constantly finding new ways to eavesdrop on connections and steal data, such as passwords and credit card numbers. This is why it’s crucial that you take every measure to ensure that your data is protected, and this includes encryption.
If hackers do gain access to your site, they can damage its reputation and hurt search engine rankings, lower user engagement and conversions, and even make files irrecoverable. As such, it’s important to focus on front-end as well as back-end security to prevent these attacks.
The best way to mitigate this threat is through input validation and sanitization. This is the process of ensuring that any data submitted through forms, such as text fields and checkboxes, is valid and free from malicious code, such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS). Many modern web frameworks automatically sanitize user input as a standard feature.
Another good practice is to limit user permissions on your site. This helps prevent any team members from changing sensitive information such as passwords or exposing it to other users. It’s also a good idea to limit the ability to view sensitive areas of your website, such as the database or a backup copy of the application.
Keeping software and libraries up to date is essential as attackers are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities they can exploit. This can be done through patch management or by deploying a WAF to monitor and filter HTTP traffic between your web server and the internet.
Deploying a WAF can help you avoid many types of common web-based threats, including SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS) and LDAP/SAML authentication bypass. A WAF can also mitigate the risk of a DDoS attack by monitoring for suspicious behavior and limiting requests to specific IP addresses or by blocking traffic altogether if an attack is detected.
Regardless of how secure your site is, it’s important to have backups in place. This includes both local and remote backups, so that you can recover from any data loss or hardware failure. Additionally, it’s important to have a clear plan for dealing with any attacks that occur, including containment, eradication and recovery steps. This involves having a response team in place that understands the impact of an attack on your business and is prepared to respond promptly. Having a plan in place will reduce the time it takes to recover and will minimize the cost of an attack. In addition, it will also help to reduce the impact of a breach and improve your company’s reputation.