Increase your website security and protection against attacks

With the Coronavirus situation, many businesses switched to working from home (like ourselves). As a result, websites are being used and relied upon more and therefore becoming increasingly under attacks of various forms. Everyone needs to be smarter in trying to prevent the websites they look after and improve website security.

What types of website attacks can occur?

There are several types of attacks that we constantly try to look out for and keep our platforms updated. A few examples are:

• Brute Force Attacks – This is where someone constantly tries to gain access to your website by guessing usernames and passwords.
• DDoS Attacks – This is where someone sends lots of traffic to a website in an attempt to slow it down and prevent normal traffic from getting to it.
• Probing attacks – Trying to find vulnerabilities in the software to exploit, such as plugins.

There are many other types of attacks but these are the most common one we see.

What can be done to help prevent attacks on a website?

We’ve been working hard, making changes to the websites on our more dedicated hosting platforms and higher packages:

• We have been changing the default login URL for these websites. Customers who edit their own websites are being informed of the new details. Attackers will find it harder to get access to the website.
• We then completely block the default URLs using an external security service to block this traffic from getting to the website and the server.
• Blocking of “Bad Agents” – Programs that, from our monitoring and research, cause unnecessary traffic and load on the websites and servers.
• Regular software updates – For our customers on the right package level, we monitor your websites and perform updates to both the website and server software as required. We also take regular backups to ensure continued service.

With the changes we’ve made so far, we’ve stopped thousands of potential attacks on the websites and servers. This reduces the strain on the servers, allowing them to process more real visitor traffic. We continue to monitor and make adjustments to ensure they’re as protected as much as possible.
It’s important to make sure that any changes to prevent attacks are done properly. You don’t want to negatively impact your website or prevent yourself from accessing your website.

Over the last few months, our systems and changes have stopped 10s of thousands of threats every month and we continue to monitor and make changes.

If you’d like us to look after the hosting and support for your WordPress website or give your website a quick review, please contact us and we can discuss it with you.