Best Practices for Website Security

Websites are the face of the internet these days. Anyone who needs to find something on the internet or provide some services using the internet requires websites to interact. Websites are a key part of the modern world as every service now has a website; be it a video service, a product delivery service, or some business.

That is why having secure websites is as important as any other aspect of the business or organization. In modern times, cyber crimes are at an all-time high and ever-increasing thus, resulting in more threats for websites, developers, and maintainers. In this article, we shall go through some of the best practices approved by various national and international organizations to keep your websites as secure as possible.

Best Practices for Website Securities

Regularly Update Software

One of the simplest steps, which is also the most ignored cyber security practice for websites, is keeping all the software used in a website up to date. Almost all software such as the programming languages used in the development of a website are, generally, regularly maintained and updated. These updates are consequences of some vulnerabilities being found in their predecessor versions.
Cyber criminals can use these non-patched/updated software versions to exploit a website and can cause any type of trouble, from accessing sensitive data to completely rendering the website useless. Thus, keeping the softwares used in a website is of utmost importance.

Data Encryption

Data encryption is a big boon for users and a bane for attackers. Encrypted data is extremely hard to exploit thus, making your website secure. Data Encryption should be used in both transmission of data and statically stored data.

When, transmitting data to and from a website, HTTPs protocol should always be preferred over standard HTTP as it encrypts data during transmission and thus, preventing any sort of eavesdropping.
In statically stored data, such as in servers and databases, encryption methods such as hashing provides high level of security allowing data securitye even if an attacker manages to gain access to your servers.

Access Control

Some of the mistakes that web-developers, not trained in cyber security, do is that they allow users access to things they should not have access to at all such as allowing a ordinary user access to admin panels, whether knowingly or not. This could be a hazardous situation for companies handling sensitive data on their websites. Thus, implementing Access Control, restricting access based on various criteria is a good practice in order to secure a website.

One of the better ways of implementing Access Control is by using the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) approach. In this approach, users are allowed access to website based on their roles. For example, an administrator can access most of the site, a developer can access only the code and not the data, a database-administrator can only access the databases, etc. An important aspect of using this method is by clarifying the roles of users.

Security Testing

No matter how many security measures you take, they are no good unless they are tested against actual threats. Thus, getting your website penetration-tested is essential. A penetration-tester can identify vulnerabilities that are impossible to find in production. Getting a security test for your website on a regular basis, is a good practice to find vulnerabilities on your website, which can then be patched by the developers.

However, you should not give complete access of the website to the penetration tester, instead give them restricted access, such as for a regular website user, and let them vulnerabilities from that restricted access. Also, you should clearly state the scope of the penetration test to the tester, in case you do not want them to access some particular parts of your website.

Use Strong Authentication

If your website handles user accounts then, it is a good idea to implement Multi Factor Authentication. This way, you keep the user accounts secure from any unwanted access and thus, providing a better service to them. Currently, there are dedicated softwares that provide multi factor authentication services. In such cases, a user needs to enter the password as well as some one time code/or approval from the multi factor authentication service to ensure that they are the actual users. These services are generally mobile apps or OTPs such as Microsoft Authenticator, etc.

Backup and Recovery

Now, assuming that an attacker has managed access to your website and they have made corrupted its source code. In such cases, having a backup and recovery option allows to get your website up and running in no time, instead of having to recreate it from scratch. Another case where Backup and Recovery options come handy is when due to some unforeseen event, your data gets lost or corrupted, then you can easily recover the data from the last backup.

Web Application Firewalls (WAF)

It is not always possible to handle incoming requests and know whether they are authentic or malicious. In such cases, having a Web Application Firewall setup for your website protects it from any incoming malicious connection by actively managing all incoming connections and ports. These firewalls allow prevention from attacks such as SQL injections, Open port access, cross-site scripting etc.

Conclusion

In this article, we mentioned some if the most common but, essential practices to keep a website secure. Even if you implement all the above measures, there is no assurity that your website will be 100% secure as cyber security is a vast and ever evolving field of study. The best practice for website security is “always searching for more ways to secure your website”. If some method works one day, it might get obsolete the very next day. Thus, keep updates with new website security measures and vulnerabilities is the best way to keep your website as secure as possible.