When signing up for a web hosting account, most feel confident that the provider takes all the preventive measures to make sure their personal information is safe.\u00a0 While most companies do try to secure their hosting platforms, one should never assume that these security measures are 100% reliable.\u00a0 Hackers are determined and very skilled at their craft.\u00a0 They will employ various techniques and use numerous tools to break into your website.\u00a0 One of the most effective weapons in their arsenal of tricks is malware.<\/p>\n
Appalling Numbers<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2008, web security firm ScanSafe, released a report that raised a lot of concern in the hosting industry.\u00a0 The report revealed figures from research conducted between May 2007 to May 2008, showing that 68% of legitimate websites studied were unknowingly hosting malware.\u00a0 Researchers at ScanSafe say that crafty intruders were able to compromise websites of various sizes from well known entities to small businesses.<\/p>\n Nature.com is one site that was victimized.\u00a0 According to Quantcast, this site receives more than 700,000 unique visitors each month, making it one of the top 500 most trafficked sites on the web.\u00a0 ScanSafe’s study found that malicious code was embedded into web pages on Nature.com.\u00a0 Thankfully, the administrators detected and rectified the issue very quickly.\u00a0 Although the website was only compromised for a single day, an estimated 30,000 users could have been at the risk of malware infection.<\/p>\n A Double Threat<\/strong><\/p>\n So, how do intruders sneak these malicious scripts into an innocent website?\u00a0 They use a wide range of methods and one of them is an attack called SQL (Structured Query Language) injection.\u00a0 Numerous security reports show that risk of exposure to website hacking has increased by more 400% since 2008.\u00a0 It has been reported that backdoor installing and password thieving malware accounts for the fastest growing attacks, threats that increased by over 800%.<\/p>\n The ScanSafe report shows that SQL injection is one exploit that aids the most in malware attacks.\u00a0 With this type of attack, a hacker inserts SQL code into a simple form on a web page, any application that interacts with a backend database.\u00a0 They can then send requests to steal information from the database or communicate with it in malicious ways to compromise other visitors that may interact with the site.\u00a0 SQL injections are such a huge problem because so many webmasters do not take the proper security measures when developing applications and administering databases.\u00a0 Most simply rely on simple authentication based on a username and password.\u00a0 By using an SQL select query, a hacker can take those values, compare them to the information in the database, find a match and get the access they need.\u00a0 With all the advanced hacking tools available, this process can be done very quickly.<\/p>\n Keeping Your Website Safe<\/strong><\/p>\n Malware is a very dangerous security threat with the power to bring down a single website or an entire server.\u00a0 It comes in various forms and can go undetected for quite sometime.\u00a0 When the victim finds out, it is usually too late.\u00a0 You can keep your site protected against spyware, Trojans, viruses and other malware by making sure you web applications are completely secure.\u00a0 If you are not quite sure, get yourself a vulnerability scanner to scan your site for security holes.\u00a0 It is a small investment that can spare you a lot of heartache.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When signing up for a web hosting account, most feel confident that the provider takes all the preventive measures to make sure their personal information is safe.\u00a0 While most companies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[321,476,204,474,475,102,271],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security-issues","tag-hackers","tag-malicious-scripts","tag-malware","tag-malware-attack","tag-scansafe","tag-security","tag-sql-injection"],"views":87,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}