5 Ways to Enhance Your Cybersecurity Plan Now

Online businesses more than ever have to ensure that their cybersecurity detail is continuously changing to thwart threats that are levied by cybercriminals and hackers. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business, your online presence, brand awareness, and reputation with your customers are contingent on the security measures you keep updated. You don’t want your website to be prune to cyberattacks. So, the best preventative method is to create a tough cybersecurity plan.

Why is a cybersecurity plan so critical?

An unprotected website makes your business, its’ clients, users, and other visitors susceptible to cyber-attacks, phishing scams, hackers, malware, and other security breaches. This article will help you to optimise your online presence and ensure you enhance your cybersecurity plan.

Having a secure website is critical to your success and protecting you and your users’ personal information. Not only for sensitive information like credit cards, passwords, emails, and any other data you are collecting from your users but also to ensure that you have protection from attacks by hackers, malware, and viruses. The hidden cost cost of cyber-attacks are huge. Check out this article for more on the cost of Ransomeware attacks.

Security savvy users and customers demand more security before disclosing any private information about themselves on any website. Consequently, if you do not secure your website, it can negatively impact your traffic.

No need for expert-level programming skills. Applying your skills along with help from your hosting provider, you can secure your website. All you need are a few tools from Hosting.uk and follow these quick, easy steps, and you are on your way to a secure and bulletproof website.

First, Let’s Discuss the Basic Line of Cyber Defense

The simplest way to safeguard your website from attackers is to enable HTTPS for your URL. HTTPS is activated by installing an SSL Certificate (secure socket layers) to your website. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate is a digital encryption protocol that protects online communication from a browser to a server. Think of this as the immune system for your website, preventing and blocking hackers from stealing your users’ sensitive and private information is transmitted over the internet.

Next in your basic cybersecurity plan starter kit is having a cloud-based back up enabled from your hosting provider. Everyone needs a backup plan. This is your fail-safe if your website becomes compromised, hacked, or lost due to data attacks. You can restore your site from its most recent backup.

This ensures that a breached website can be restored quickly while the weak points are patched up. If your site offline for hours it can severely affect your business and its reputation with your clients. What’s worst is, losing all of your data, counting all of the content you’ve created, along with client confidential and important files to cybercriminals malicious intent. Back-up is a security measure as well as a safety precaution that you need to have at all times.

For more on website backup, read this article.

5 Ways to Change Your Cybersecurity Detail

1. Upgrade your hosting plan to VPS or dedicated hosting.

You’re serious about your business, growing your following, increasing your daily traffic, and expanding your bottom line. Your website server is the key to your business success. You need a robust hosting environment that is versatile and scalable to grow with your business.

With VPS hosting, you get a virtual private server that operates in a shared environment to keep costs lower and come with built-in security features. With managed VPS solutions, your hosting provider can maintain your server and apply any special server applications for you. Add on website monitoring services to ensure your server is under constant surveillance and maintenance.

A dedicates server is the ultimate in hosting solutions. With this option, you own the entire server. What’s more is, because your server is functioning independently without any other websites, you lower the risk of security breaches.

2. Only Install Software You Need

Only use software that you need to run on your server and by extension, your website. Keeping software installed on your server that isn’t frequently used or isn’t necessary is another one of those windows inviting hackers and cybercriminals to come and play with your server. Be particular if you are running a WordPress site and using a variety of Plugins. Only download and install Plugins or software from trustworthy sources and only what you require. Take no chances anything else runs a very high-security risk.

3. Monitoring Tools

All websites require constant monitoring to ensure that security breaches do not happen; uptime is always at 99.9%, server health, web applications, metrics, and network performance, to name a few. Add monitoring 24/7 tools to your hosting package to ensure your website is always functioning at its optimum. Check out this versatile website monitoring software.

4. Robust Security Features for your Server

The best part of opting for VPS or a dedicated server is that it is fully customisable. If you choose one of these hosting solutions, as a business, you can install specialised security software to safeguard your website further. You want to get an Antivirus for your server.

Having great antivirus software in your cybersecurity plan for defence is crucial to your site’s success and reputation with your audience and clients. Cybercriminals and hackers are using more and more sophisticated software systems to probe millions of sites daily to exploit vulnerabilities and bring sites offline.

Cyber-criminals will use any vulnerability it can find in your website’s defences to bring your site to its knees. For this reason, you must ensure that the hosting provider you choose uses the utmost in web security. What’s more, is that a breached site can cost you hundreds of pounds in fines and fees as safety is the maximum in data protection for your customers.

If you’re not sure how to choose the right server antivirus to be sure to contact technical support at your host provider to ask questions.

Here are some criteria on what to look for:

• Direct malware detection – Sever antivirus should provide you with quick malware detection and prevention from the threats, including trojans, worms, and other viruses.
• Sandboxing  –  this feature authenticates all the processes running on the server and prevents any malicious attacks from piercing the system and harming your server. Unrecognised apps or measures get automatically sandboxed and run under special restrictions.
• HIPS (Host Intrusion Protection)  - this option monitors all the activities of the apps and processes on the server, and it halts any malicious activity that could damage the data, OS, system-memory, or registry keys.
• Virtual Desktop  -  this is a sandboxing environment that allows Internet access and beta-software testing without upsetting the file structure.
• Rescue Disk -  rescue disc performs pre-boot antivirus scans, and it can recover passwords, detect and remove the rootkit or allow you to transform the data from the damaged disk to another drive.

5. Maintain and Secure Databases

Another vulnerable point of entry commonly exploited by cybercriminals are databases where possible delicate financial customer information may be stored. As such, your databases should be a top priority when it comes to security. Best practices are to ensure databases are SQL injection resistant, preserve database user privilege to a minimum. That is, only the server manager, delete unnecessary data, and restrict areas of interaction between the customers and the database where it isn’t required. To help mitigate this, there are various administrative tools for databases.

Continue reading about cyber security best practices on our blog.