How to Protect Your Website From Hackers and Cyberthugs

Published July 31, 2010
 
In a perfect world, you’d be able to mind your own business and cheerfully run a successful online business without being harassed by “cyberthugs.” However, until that perfect world comes, you’ll need to slap great big KEEP OUT sign on your website. This means creating security settings which will disallow access to sensitive data and controls. This article will show you how to take these simple steps and keep your website safe from hackers.

The Most Common Site Attacks

Unless you’re the FBI, the IRS or the CIA or someone else with a sensitive high profile organization, you won’t be getting targeted by sophisticated hackers. However, there are plenty of amateur hackers who create automated scripts to penetrate people’s web security and deface their website.

As you can imagine, fixing the damage done by these “script kiddies” can be time consuming and all the while, you could be losing business and credibility. Let’s look at a few simple things you can do to keep these types of hackers from accessing your site.

Simple Site Security Measures

When you monitor the logs of your website, you’ll find that hack attempts typically come from the user-agent “libwww-perl.” These user-agents attempt to access pages (URLs) on your site for the sake of injecting code or uploading files into your site. Once these scripts (often called “botnet” scripts) are injected or uploaded, they can wreak havoc on your website and disable many of your interactive functions such as server side programs.

These types of hacks can be prevented by simple blocking access from libwww-perl user-agents and URLS which include the command “=http:” “=http:” is a common code which is used by who hackers attempting to access your site and connect it to another site which contains the malicious script or software. For example:

http://www.example.com/page.php?id1=http://www.strangersite.com/id.txt?

This can be prevented by adding a code to your .htaccess file which disallows libwww-perl user-agents from accessing your site:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

In addition to blocking access from potentially harmful agents, you’ll want to block the directory browsing on your website. When directory browsing is enabled, users can access directories/folders which contain your files, this means your web pages, your CSS files and any files which are uploaded to your server. You can block directory browsing on your site using the following steps:

  • Click on the “index manager” option from your CNC panel.
  • Click on the directory/folder on which you wish to disable browsing.
  • Select the “no index” option and save your settings.
Once you’ve completed this, you can double check the blocked settings by typing the directory URL into your browser. Repeat this set of steps for every directory which  you wish to block directory browsing on, which (with very few exceptions) would be all of your directories.

Other Security Precautions to Consider

In addition to blocking directory browsing and libwww-perl access, have your web programmer change any scripts using the GET command and have them replace that command with the POST instead. Without getting into the VERY detailed explanation of the difference, the GET command is much less secure than POST and there’s really no difference in the options provided by either.

Also, before you change any of your file permissions to 777 (read/write/execute) be sure that you a specific reason for doing so. Most of the time, it’s better for you to leave these changes to your web programmer. If you purchase a piece of server side software which requires you to change file permissions to 777, be sure that you thoroughly research it on all the major search engines before using it and to proceed with caution.

If you require the assistance of a web programmer to complete any of the above tasks, you can hire one and they can complete these simple steps in no more than one hour. In fact, you can also hire them to create your robotstxt file, execute your file compression and create your meta tags, all of which they can complete as a reasonable small and inexpensive job.

Conclusion

These simple security measures will keep most cyberthugs out of your website. If you feel that your site might become the target of more experienced and determined hackers, your next course of action would be to hire a professional web security consultant. However, unless you’re a high profile organization with supersensitive and valuable data on your site, these measures alone will most likely solve your security concerns.

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