Like most technology, websites are prone to hacking. People with malicious intentions often hack into vulnerable websites to collect personal information or to launch mass email campaigns containing spam or viruses. Being on the receiving end of an attack can be an incredibly frustrating and sometimes violating experience. Everyone is vulnerable, even our giant corporations and government level systems.
The websites we create are always setup with security features installed. There are advanced monitoring and protection systems available that add additional levels of security. Determining if these are worthwhile to pay for can be a little tricky. It’s important to consider what effect would that have on your business? If your site is selling large amounts of products or sales, then a few days down could be an expensive loss. If your site is lower traffic or more just informative, then it might not be as big of a risk.
More often that not, getting a virus can, at worst, cause functional errors or trigger the host to deactivate the site temporarily until fixed. It is still common, however, that more devastating things can happen: malicious images or text replacing your own, customer data vulnerability, files deleted or mass spam emails sent out from your domain.
What else can I do?
Beyond purchasing additional security systems, it’s also important to keep the site up to date. Regular software updates will help keep your website more secure. Check through your site regularly to make sure everything looks and functions as normal. Sometimes when a site is hacked, strange code, functional problems or alignment issues can arise. Sometimes they are minor and hard to notice so it’s important to keep a close eye on your web pages.
What happens when site gets infected?
In depends on the severity and type of infection. Google can pick up on the problem and warn visitors that a site has been infecting. This is great for the protection of your customers, but often deters site visitors. Infected sites can also be used to mass email spam mail out. This can result in the site being deactivated by the host servers.
Once a site is infected it either needs to be restored from a backup from before the infection. The other possible option is to use different scanning tools to isolate infected files and manually delete them which, as you can imagine, can be a time consuming and in depth process. Depending on the severity and regularity of the infection, prices can vary. Fortunately, with regular software updates and site scans, we can usually avoid these issues all together.