The security and protection of your website should be your top priority.
Website Security Improvement
Top Security!
If you have ever been the victim of a hacking attack, you know the feeling well… if you haven’t yet, we guarantee you won’t like it at all!
FIRSTIDEA specializes in website optimization and has spent countless nights trying to solve problems of the past. With its extensive experience, it now offers a range of improvements in the area of website security to help you protect all the hard work you have put into your website. We can shield it to the point where it will be practically impossible to penetrate!
According to statistics and surveys that have been conducted:
Every day, thousands of attacks are carried out on websites, with the aim of either stealing data or causing damage.
43% of cyber attacks target small and medium-sized businesses, as they often have inadequate protection measures in place.
A compromised website may be rejected by search engines or display warning screens to visitors, resulting in a loss of valuable traffic and credibility.
Do you want to protect your website preventively, or has it already been hacked?
Would you like us to improve the security of your website?
Performing a 'File Scan'
The first thing we do when you submit your website for security optimization is to scan all of its files to detect any signs of hacking. If anything is found, we examine possible ways to restore it and inform you. If nothing is found, we proceed to the next steps.
Checking for vulnerable extensions (Vulnerabilities)
We check whether the extensions used on the page have any history of vulnerability and examine whether they need to be upgraded to the latest version (if it has been fixed) or whether they need to be removed and replaced with another equivalent one.
File Permissions setting
As all administrators know, the permissions of the files and folders that make up your website are the first line of defense against would-be hackers. It is therefore essential that they are correctly set to 755 for folders and 644 for files. This provides the first level of security we desire.
Add extra codes for management
All popular platforms are very often the target of malicious attacks. It is very easy for hackers’ “bots” to visit the login page of the administration and start spamming with passwords in order to gain access. We deal with this in two ways:
- We change the administrator Login URL to something completely personal to you, so that no one else can visit it except you, as they will not know the address.
- In the event that someone nevertheless finds your Login URL, before allowing them access to enter your master codes, we assign them a preliminary code that they must also know.
In case of failed login attempts, you will be automatically notified by email so that you can take the necessary security measures.
Creating an '.htaccess' file
The .htaccess file is responsible for many server-level settings, such as blocking access to system files that should not be accessible from the web, redirecting between pages based on custom criteria, or even optimizing website performance. We create such a file for you, thereby achieving a significant increase in security:
- Hide directories: We write the necessary commands so that your website folders are not accessible from the web.
- Blocking file injections: Many users try to exploit weaknesses in your website’s extensions and trick them into including malicious code hosted on the attacker’s server. By passing the appropriate commands to the htaccess file, we block such attacks.
- Blocking ‘PHP easter eggs’: ‘PHP easter eggs’ are a way for aspiring hackers to see which version of PHP your website is using and launch a specialized attack on that specific version. With the appropriate settings, we can disable this feature.
- Blocking specific robots: With the appropriate commands, we completely block access to your website by specific user agents that are used maliciously. The block list we create significantly reduces the number of unwanted visits to your website.
- Performance optimization: The htaccess file allows you to include commands for speed optimization commands as well as commands that help with SEO (Google ranking). This is an extra service we provide upon request.
Adding and configuring a firewall
By adding a firewall, we greatly increase the security of your website and protect you from most potential risks:
- IP Blacklist and Whitelist: Traffic to your website is monitored 24/7, and IP addresses that frequently attempt to breach your website are automatically placed on a Blacklist, prohibiting access to your website. Conversely, if you use specific IP addresses to manage your website, we can place these addresses on a Whitelist so that only they have access to manage your page.
- Blocking SQL injections: SQL injections are a method of attacking your database by inserting malicious SQL code. Your firewall protects you from such attacks, which are among the top 10 most frequent cyber attacks.
- Anti-Spam: A hidden field is added to every registration or contact form, which is not visible to the naked eye, but only in the code. This way, when a robot tries to fill out the form, it will also fill out this field, which will indicate that it is not a human but a bot, and it will be blocked by the firewall. Also, if requested, we create a list of “bad” words that usually accompany spam, such as pharmaceutical terminology, etc., and whenever one of these is detected, it is automatically blocked.
- Upload Scanner: Every file that attempts to be uploaded is checked by the firewall. If it contains even a single line of PHP code, it is blocked.
Integration into 'Project Honeypot'
Project Honeypot is a collaborative effort to collect data on spammers and rank them on a risk list according to their activity. So, when someone has accumulated enough “points” for bad behavior, they are automatically blocked from all websites participating in the Honeypot project. In this way, we block bad users before they even have a chance to misbehave on your website.
Add CDN (Content Delivery Network) security
In addition to increasing speed, a proper CDN also provides increased security for your website. We provide you with a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) through which you will gain basic code optimization, an extra caching feature for faster speeds, and the use of the CDN firewall as an extra protection filter between your website and visitors.
Add anti-spam reCAPTCHA
If, despite the above, you still have problems with spamming bots, we install Google’s reCAPTCHA application. This means that every contact form, registration form, comment form, etc. will display a test that the user must answer or complete correctly in order to proceed.
Change - hide the 'Generator Meta Tag'
The generator meta tag is the information contained in your website’s source code and shows which tool was used to build the website, e.g. Joomla! or WordPress. All large and popular platforms, such as the two mentioned above, are often targeted by hackers who happen to have identified a weakness in the platform and send their robots to find potential victims! So, by hiding or falsifying this information, we confuse the robots that scan your page looking for weaknesses and prevent them from launching their targeted attack.
Optional transfer to a secure server
Firstidea collaborates with Siteground to provide you with excellent hosting services that will relieve you of any worries and improve your website’s security and speed. Read more here: Website Hosting Services.
We implement practices that shield your website from known cyber attacks, making its defense extremely strong.
