The presence on the Internet is today more essential than ever for any company, including those small local businesses that also want to reach the maximum possible audience. social networks are a magnificent tool to achieve this, since at the end of the day we will have access to a lot of users and followers from them, being able to publish news, offers, promotions, etc … However, if We are a company already with a certain name and we want to expand even more, it will not serve us only to have these social networks up to date. We will also need a reference space in which we can show, at a single glance and in an efficient and elegant way, everything we are and what we offer. Hence web pages remain essential platforms for many businesses.
And it is that the information that we find in a social network can be somewhat more chaotic than the one we have on our website, which will always be well ordered. The visibility that we can also achieve with the web, especially if we know how to perform a good SEO, will allow us to place ourselves at the top of the user’s searches and reach a much larger audience. And in fact, if what we sell are products, we can even have an online store within the website itself, to offer the option of direct purchase to our customers. Maintaining a small and efficient website, with its domain, its hosting and its online store, does not have to be especially complicated if we learn to do it correctly. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t just depend on us, but we can also suffer problems such as hacking by a cybercriminal, something that can cause us a lot of insecurity.
What is a web hack
Web hacking is the method by which hackers, cyber criminals with great skills and knowledge of computer security, sneak into a specific web page to gain control of it. This serves to knock it down, that is, to leave it inactive for a certain time, to post messages as if they were administrators, causing a tricky situation for the company that runs the web, to delete or add content to it or simply to get customer or company data, data that can be very sensitive, such as addresses and full names, and even credit card registration in some cases . Small-scale web hacking is usually carried out precisely to obtain this data , which is then sold for a good sum of money.
What happens when our website is hacked
When these cybercriminals enter our website and manage to bypass the security we have in place, they can take over the entire domain of our site. Sometimes the security protocol has several firewalls to prevent that even when someone sneaks onto the web, they can go very far. That is why the most common thing is that the hack ends up taking down our website for a few hours or even days , until we take control of it again. If hackers are skilled or our security is not so good, maybe they can steal important data, or even publish as if it were us, to modify or delete the database … All of them problems serious enough that they can destroy all the work we have been doing previously, leading us to a truly unwanted situation.
How do they do it?
Each hacker has his own reference manual when it comes to carrying out these types of actions. We may be facing a “lone wolf”, a hacker who works alone from home and who has advanced security knowledge , so he is capable of circumventing the protection systems we have through malware, viruses or simply taking advantage of any system security flaw. They can also be an organized group that, for whatever reason, choose our website as a target , either to get something from us, or simply to annoy us. This is common with some companies that have entered into strong controversies over issues such as abortion, citizen security or have positioned themselves in a relevant way on sensitive issues , which has made some groups of hackers go against them to take down their website and leave them inactive for a while.
Avoid hacking our website
It will depend on what we want for our website and of course, also on our performance with it, our relevance, etc … Hiring a security and anti-hacking system is usually the most effective solution, but also It is quite expensive, and in some cases it is not even worth doing because in the end we are paying a lot for protection that we probably won’t need, like putting five security guards outside a small fish shop. We must be consistent with the real danger that our website may be experiencing, and hire a security plan according to it, always bearing in mind that receiving one of these hacking attacks can be devastating at certain times, when our website is our center of operations.
It may be interesting to move the user databases away from the website itself, and hire two independent servers, one for our platform and the other for the online store. Thus, if hackers seek to enter the web, they will be able to take it down but not get hold of user data and information, which is something much more delicate. If we run the web on our own, we must be very attentive to any type of failure that may occur in it, suspicious movements in the login , strange changes that we did not remember having made … All this may be clues real that something strange is happening on the web, and we will go, if necessary, to a security expert to detect the possible hack of our page before it goes too far.