Websites are becoming the first, preferred, and sometimes only means of information for people increasingly relying on the internet to learn about and interact with the world. From lofty concepts to digital storefronts, leaving an impression means building a memorable, intuitive, and secure website. Ordinary users might not pay much attention to the security aspect. Still, the pretty facades would easily crumble without it.
Intertwining cybersecurity concepts and tools with hosting practices is integral for creating and maintaining safe and successful websites. This article touches on various protective measures that secure the sites themselves, their environment, and the data they may process. Open-source developments advance this relationship. Read on to learn how.
SSL/TLS Encryption
Guaranteed privacy and data security is the cornerstone of any trustworthy website. Web hosts provide it by implementing certification. Certificates like SSL and TLS facilitate the encryption and safeguarding of sensitive data like login details and payment information.
The original SSL or Secure Socket Layer protocol was originally a proprietary technology. However, its evolution and subsequent introduction of Transport Layer Security or TLS created a new, open-source standard.
Today, the majority of hosted websites use OpenSSL, a more advanced communication security and encryption protocol. Its open-source nature means the code is transparent. Anyone with the knowledge and willingness to further website security can contribute.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Protecting user data is vital, but it’s only part of a comprehensive web-hosting cybersecurity strategy. There are still attacks like SQL injections and cross-site scripting to be wary of, and that’s where WAFs come in.
Web Application Firewalls behave like reverse proxies. They monitor and identify incoming traffic, letting normal visitors and requests through while stopping actions that could harm the website’s integrity or operation. They prevent session hijacking and brute force attacks and can also detect when a DDoS attack is taking place.
Adopting an open-source WAF has several advantages. They’re usually free, which cuts hosting costs. The best WAFs stay up-to-date and have dedicated communities that promptly provide fixes for emerging threats. Lastly, open-source WAFs outperform proprietary solutions when it comes to customizability and breadth of features while preventing vendor lock-in.
DDoS Protection
Low cybersecurity hygiene among ordinary users and the explosion of connected devices pose another risk. It’s easy to infect an unprotected device or system and direct swarms of them called botnets to carry out attacks. Such botnets can overwhelm a website with requests, preventing access for legitimate visitors.
It’s possible to thwart Distributed Denial of Service attacks through a combination of measures. Firewalls will block some traffic, but dedicated intrusion prevention systems are better. They use rulesets to identify and mitigate DDoS attacks during execution and log the incidents.
Load balancers are another cornerstone of DDoS protection as they help distribute excessive traffic to multiple servers or server instances, preventing the attack from overwhelming any one of them.
While not directly involved, VPNs can also help mitigate DDoS threats. And many ask, what does a VPN hide? It hides your IP, and by doing that, it can redirect traffic toward dedicated DDoS protection services. Moreover, routing a website’s traffic through a VPN can trick bad actors into launching attacks on the provided IP address, leaving the original unharmed.
Antivirus and Anti-Malware
We’ve explored threats that target user data and internet traffic. However, addressing these may still leave the server infrastructure that houses a website vulnerable. Shared hosting is especially risky since individual website owners don’t have control over what data other users store or accidentally download onto a server.
Antivirus and anti-malware prevent any malicious code that makes it past firewalls and other protections from doing more harm. They’ll identify and quarantine a wide and rapidly growing variety of viruses, Trojans, and worms before they multiply and spread from one server to the entire network infrastructure.
VPN
Whenever virtual private networks come up, people assume they’re only useful for protecting individuals’ privacy or at the enterprise level for encrypting sensitive communication and data. However, they may strengthen a hosting provider’s cybersecurity posture as well.
DDoS attack mitigation is only one way they can help. VPNs are even more useful whenever administrators are accessing or altering a website’s contents. Their encrypted connection negates eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks, preventing bad actors from trying to alter a website’s contents or stealing sensitive information only administrators can access.
Some VPNs have additional features you can notice in the VPN comparison table – one of these great features is IP whitelisting. This is another impactful security measure that limits access to a website to specific accredited devices. It’s essential for development and testing purposes but also useful for strict access control for private websites.
Conclusion
Securing a website is a multi-faceted effort reaching beyond code optimization and data encryption. It requires an ecosystem of best practices, third-party solutions, and constant innovation to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. Some staples of the cybersecurity industry remain vital, but their open-source alternatives blaze the trail and find clever solutions to unconventional dangers more often than not.
