The very word hacking instills a lot of fear among website owners. To my amazement I found the word hack has been first used by Prof John Nash (remember Hollywood movie beautiful mind). Yes, it is a real story and he used it as putdown. Now lets know what is hacking!
Hacking can be good to but it is increasing used these days with evil desires. Earlier a hack was typically a turn around or quick fix to a technical problem. But now a days hacking increasing means breaking into a website, email account, server, network etc.
Website hacking has been a major headache of webmasters across the world these days. Who are these people and why they hack websites? A lot of Indian websites including many government websites has been hacked recently and defaced. My websites has been hacked couple of times and I still have no clue who did. After the advent of search engines, a major part of website traffic comes from search engines. And every time a site is hacked, it is blocked in Google, it affects it free search traffic adversely. It may also affect the rank of a website in the long run. If you are running a commercial site, your business will be affected. Even if you are running a blog and monetized it, your bottom line will be affected.
Now I am sure you are about to ask what you can do to prevent it. Well there is not much help in this regard. If you have hired professional websites then you can leave it upto them. Otherwise, you will have to pick up the required knowledge yourself. Even you go for the web host, they will tell that sites get hacked on their web space. But we can definitely take few steps to increase the defense of our sites as follows:
1. Go for a web host which is pro-active, give quick response and helpful. In such events you can ask your web host to clean the website. A good web host will do so for their clients.
2. Hackers employs dictionary attack to break into your website. So avoid dictionary words. Use alphanumeric password with strong combination of #*@, upper case and lower case. If your website is hacked that may indicate that your FTP password is compromised, please change it immediately.
3. You can disable the FTP option in your web control panel when not in use.
4. Do not keep any unused script on your web space.
5. Do not keep any default user name and password apart from demo sites.
6. Update your scripts like WordPress as soon as a new update is available. Old scripts are more vulnerable to hacking as the week points become public.
7. Maintain a mirror copy of your website offline.
8. Monitor your web space everyday. If you see any extra file, immediately check it. If malicious, delete it. Now a days hackers typically inject malicious codes in your script files. The malicious codes are typically on the top of bottom of the files. Cleaning one file at a time is a tedious job. Now you can delete the affected files and upload a backup copy of the files you maintained offline.
9. If you see your search results are affected in Google or site blocked signage appeared then file a reconsideration.
There are disturbing trends where rival countries engage in cyber warfare. Indian websites are hacked my Pakistanis and then there was news of Chinese cyber war. There was a report in Bangalore Mirror, wherein the a guy associated with the site Indiancyberarmy.com signed up in a Pakistani Forum called Pakbugs.com and to his horror he saw it was a den of website hacking and training. They knowing instigates students and techies to hack Indian sites. The site even contains a list of vulnerable Indian sites. In such a situation, do what ever you can to strengthen the defense of your website and be always vigilant.
