Home / Is your data really secure?

Over the last few months there have been various attack attempts on high profile companies and in some cases these have been successful. The successful attack attempts have resulted in customers/companies data being stolen and put to misuse across the internet.

Some examples include

Customer and company data stolen from Sony’s internal network.
Microsoft and Sony’s online gaming services brought down.

It’s not only large corporations that are at risk. Somerset Web Services have also seen websites and email systems of smaller companies that have been affected.

There are a couple of reasons why attacks like these are successful.

Not using strong passwords

With the number of user names and passwords we all must have for websites like social media and online shopping, its easy to use the same, simple password on all these websites. The problem with this is that if someone were to obtain your password from one of these websites, then they would potentially be able to access the others.

To make sure your password is strong and secure, this is the recommended practice to follow:

• Have a minimum of eight characters or more
• Have both upper-case and lower-case characters
• Contains at least one number
• Contains at least one special character
• Have different passwords for different websites

Not updating software regularly

The advantage of a CMS system like WordPress is that, as it is the most popular CMS system on the web with more then 60 million websites made (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress), it has many advantages.

• Regular updates with new features and security fixes
• A vast range of plugins to help enhance and improve security

It is important to update the software on your website to the latest version to take advantage of the new security features WordPress offers. Failure to do these updates could swiftly leave your website vulnerable to hackers attempting to exploit older versions.

If you would like some advice/assistance with your passwords or with updating your WordPress software then we would happy for you to contact us to discuss it further.