4 Things Website Admin Can Do To Prevent Hacking

Recently, Anonymous hacked GoDaddy.com and thousand of websites went down for hours. The impact was so high because GoDaddy is world’s largest hosting service provider. Such monstrous cyber attacks seldom happen, but it proves one thing, websites are vulnerable to online criminals, no matter how secure you may think your site is.

You can always install security plug-ins in the CMS and build a firewall to keep the site safe, but often, webmasters don’t pay attention to small things and unknowingly open a back door for hackers. Here are some simple yet effective things you can do to protect your website.

1. While signing up for an account for the first time, websites often ask a security question for password recovery purpose. Instead of giving the answer in your native language, use a translator tool to translate it into some other language and copy-paste the answer.
2. Most hacking tools can’t detect spaces in a password. Therefore, start your admin password with a space to make the site safe. Even if you write down the admin password in some other places for a record, only you can know that it needs a space at the beginning.
3. You can use drive encryption software to prevent data theft. Most people think that formatting a hard drive is enough to erase data, but data recovery softwares can easily restore any erased data. However, when you install encryption software, even if someone steals the hard drive, he won’t be able to access the stored content.
4. If you are using HTTP or FTP protocol for website access, don’t enter the admin credentials in a Windows authentication popup window. HTTP and FTP protocols are not full-proof and hacking into a data transmission is easier. Whenever possible, use HTTPS and SFTP to encrypt the transmitted data.

Hackers search for website admin’s mistakes. Therefore, be careful and don’t make any stupid mistakes.