The first priority for every company is to make their website as secure as possible. No one wants any kind of vulnerabilities in their websites. Among security professionals, it is a known fact that the world wide web is highly vulnerable. There is always a chance of a security breach on your website. So, if you want protection from the black hat hackers, you must stay vigilant to keep your site safe from them.
You won’t be safe if you don’t figure out what you need to know for the safety. That’s why you need certain effective approaches that will eliminate the threats to your websites. So, in this article, we are going to discuss the different aspects that you should know about the most common website security issues and their solutions.
What Is Meant By Web Security?
The prevention process of unauthorized access to the secured confidential data that you stored online is known as web security. Due to this web security, any unauthorized person would not be able to modify the data. By enforcing some stringent policies, you get this security. If you don’t have this web security, then there are several security threats which can compromise your valuable data. And all the sensitive information that you have might be lost.
How Do You Know If A Website Is Secure Or Not?
There are different key factors that decide the security of your website. Go through the section below to get a brief about them.
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Check Secured Socket Layer Or SSL
The first thing you should check here is whether the website has an SSL certificate. SSL certificates ensure that whatever data you are passing goes secure web and encrypted. The SSL containing sites have to go through some validation processes which determine their authenticity. If it has an SSL certificate, then you get the certainty that the site is secure.
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Check For The Domain
Whenever you are logging in to a website, you should check its domain and verify whether it is the original one. Sometimes, the attackers mimic different websites where you usually log in. So, in order to get rid of such problems, you should check the corresponding domain. When you are redirecting yourself from a website to a new one, you must check for the domain name.
What Are The Security Issues?
There are a lot of security issues that you might face on your website. For them, you can easily go through the section below where you will find the issues and their respective solutions.
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SQL Injections
Whenever an attacker attempts to use the application code in order to corrupt the database, he or she does it through SQL injections. If the attacker is successful in the process of injecting the database, he or she can do anything with your site. It would only be a matter of security breach then and you will find your data updated, deleted, or as it was.
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Cross Site Scripting
In this case, the attacker injects code into the client-side script. In a web application, the cross-site scripting is there to manipulate the client-side scripting language. XSS enables the attackers to hijack different user sessions in the browser of the victim. You may be redirected to a malicious website if the attacker wants.
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Broken Authentication And Session Management
When this security is breached, the database faces a lot of problems in identifying the user who is accessing the site. An attacker can hijack an active session of a valid user any time if this vulnerability occurs. If you don’t protect the authentication credentials, then you might get into a serious problem.
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Security Misconfiguration
This also includes numerous types of security breaches that happen due to the lack of maintenance of the configuration of the web application. A secure configuration must be there in the web application in order to get the most security out of it.
With all these issues, there are some other vulnerabilities also. You may have the insecure direct object references on your site. There might be a cross-site request forgery in which the user gets a malicious attack. In this problem, a third party website will send a request to the user for accessing it. If you have already authenticated yourself on the browser, then it will affect those sections.
How Do You Make Your Website Secure?
As there are multiple security breaches that might happen, you should also know that there are multiple preventions for them as well. In the section below, the prevention of the security breaches is thoroughly discussed.
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The SQL Injection
You need a proper filtration system on your site which would filter the inputs. Sometimes, putting an SQL query into another one might prevent the problem altogether. But, you should take the framework’s filtering functions as they are more secure.
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Broken Authentication
If you haven’t used a framework in the development process, then you might face the vulnerability. So, in order to prevent such a problem, you need to use some frameworks. These frameworks offer a great authentication process which is extremely secure.
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Cross Site Scripting
The simplest solution to this security threat is, never return any HTML tags to the client as it produces a serious problem. If the attacker is injecting a plain HTML, it will defend your site from that. Usually, the most helpful workaround is to convert the HTML entities.
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Insecure Direct Object References
Try to whitelist the choices while performing the user authorization for your secure site. Whenever you are doing that, you should maintain consistency. The CGI parameters hold the data to get it passed; you should avoid doing this. You need to store the data internally and then check if the issue is still there.
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Security Misconfiguration
The only solution to this problem is that you should have a better build and deploy process. If you don’t have a good build, you can never get rid of this problem.
These are the basic measures that you can take in order to solve the security threats.
If you are encountering the common website security issues, then follow the above section in order to prevent them. Hopefully, the write-up was helpful to you.