SECURITY
SECURITY
According to Sophos Labs, one of the webs leading security service providers, a website is hacked every 5 seconds, or in real numbers, about 30,000 websites per day!
Many people and small to medium sized business owners do not understand the impact that a hacked website can have on their business, and in particular with their communications channels. A hacked website can leave them ‘in the dark’ with no means to communicate with their customers and potential customers, and equally as daunting is the fact that once a website is hacked, 99% of the time the site is ‘gone’. The code is infected, deleted or corrupted, and probably even more importantly, all of the content of the website which the owner has spent lots of time and likely money putting together is gone.
Why do websites get hacked?
The main reason is that the hacker can then use the infected website to spread their virus or malicious code, either ‘just for fun’ or more prevalently to direct those infected with their code to websites which generate money like online pharmacy sites or adult sites.
What can be done to minimize the chance of a website getting hacked?
The biggest reason that websites get hacked is that they are not kept up to date with the latest security patches and software version released. Just like your PC at home and its anti-virus software, your website needs to be maintained constantly to ensure maximum security.
At Activ, security is one of our main priorities, and we have built a robust and dependable infrastructure with many automated testing features to minimize the risk associated with websites being hacked. Of course, nothing beats the final layer of security that is a manual overview of automated systems, which is why we employ that final layer of defence across our network too.
Additionally most websites are hosted on ‘shared’ servers, which means that the website owner has no control over the other websites which ‘live’ on the same server. A small business website may be sharing a server with sites which would be deemed undesirable like those above mentioned adult sites and online pharmacies. Moving to a dedicated server can help to maximize security, but of course costs much more.
Backups
At Activ, we are able to effectively manage security threats due to our infrastructure setup.
- Our Activ Web Design software is constantly maintained and developed by us in house. It is not available to anybody outside the company to use and is always updated with the latest security patches.
- Our servers are dedicated, meaning that no sites live on them which are not built on the Activ Web Design software. We are able to vet all sites and their content, meaning the websites we host all belong to small to medium sized businesses. No dubious sites here!
- We run weekly backups of every Activ website, so in the unlikely event that a website does experience the unpleasantness of being hacked, we can have it back up and running in a matter of hours (maybe a day!) and not the weeks that it would take to build it from scratch again.
Other companies charge for this backup service, some as much as GBP40 or GBP50 per month! With an Activ website, this is already built into the transparent price you pay.
