There is highly resourceful post at Google’s official blog recently on best practices against hacking. In this post, Google addresses how websites can protect themselves against the hackers who try to take advantage of the security loopholes in the websites.
Google points out that there are various types of hackers. Some of them try to take partial control of a website while others take complete control of websites. Among the most common types of hacking, SQL injection and cross-site scripting are highly dangerous. Malicious code will be injected in web applications that have vulnerable databases. Normally manipulated URLs and web forms are used to take control of a website by malicious code injection.
Google recommends to add a layer between the front end, which will be the form, and the backend, which will be the database. If your website is a PHP based website, you can use PDO extensions rather than embedding the user input in the statement. Another recommendation from Google is character escaping. Here all the characters that are considered to be malicious and harmful to the database will be escaped.
When it comes to cross-site scripting, malicious codes are inserted into web pages directly and this will take over the entire website. When there are web applications that do not validate the data that is fed by the user, cross-site scripting can be used to inject malicious codes. Google recommends a number of ways to protect our website against cross-site scripting issues in the blog post.
One of the ways of going about the issue is to strip the input that is inserted in a form. Secondly, a layer can be created between data input and the backend that will protect the website from the malicious codes that are injected. Data encoding too seems to be highly effective in saving the website against cross-site scripting.
Generally, websites that have CMS are highly vulnerable. Google recommends that awareness about the latest security issues is highly important to protect oneself from the problems. If you are using any third party software, it is important to have your system upgraded to the latest version. If you are using open source applications, then it is all the more important to upgrade immediately to the latest version as soon as the latest version is launched. Advanced versions always try to take care of the issues that were not addressed in the previous versions including the security vulnerabilities.
When hackers take control of a website, they can even change the entire website and its performance. They can remove all the content in your website, insert cookie stealers and other serious malwares. Another common reason why hackers aim at vulnerable websites is to make use of the site for spamming. They can also use your site as a mask to redirect the visitors to websites with malwares.
If you notice that your website has been hacked, clean up the site immediately and increase the security measures without any delay so that your site does not cause too much of harm to the online community.