With regular technological development and change, it becomes increasingly challenging for businesses of all types to keep their personal and customer’s information on their financial website secure. Web security is preventing hackers and cyber-thieves from accessing sensitive information. In the absence of a proactive security strategy, spread and escalation of malware have a higher probability. These attacks can spread from computer to computer, making it difficult to find the origin. The hackers not only aim to steal your data or mess with your website layout but also attempt to use your server as an email relay for spam, temporarily set web server, normally to serve files of an illegal nature. Other breaches may include using your servers as part of a botnet, mine for bitcoins or ransomware attacks. Reasons that your site could be a target for security breach are financial gains, access to computing resources. The financial website design should be able to tackle all these problems. Web security can be done by:
- Regular software updates: Up to date software is vital in keeping your site secure. This not only applies to the server operating system but also to any software you may be running on your website. Apply for software patches for third-party software on your website.
- Prevent SQL injection: This happens when you use standard Transact SQL and unknowingly you insert rogue code into your query, which can be manipulated to alter tables or data deletion. Prevent this by using parameterized queries.
- Error messages: The information given in error messages should be limited. This prevents data leak secrets on your server. Show only the information that is needed.
- Validation: Validation of both on the browser and server side must be done. Prevent data bypass through your browser, as malicious code or script can be inserted through it into your database.
- Passwords: Provide strong passwords to your server and admin area. Minimum character count, the combination of uppercase and lowercase characters etc strategies must be applied. Store these passwords as encrypted values and compare these encrypted values. Use salt password mechanism for enhanced protection.
- File uploads: Allowing users to upload files to your website can be risky. The risk is that any file uploaded, could contain a script or code that when executed on your server cause problem. Verify all the website uploads. These files should not auto-execute on your server.
- Secured networking: Pay careful attention towards the address bar of the websites before logging into them. This is a must while dealing with financial websites.
- Use different emails for dealing with official works and social media platforms.
- Use security tools to identify the potential loopholes in your website. These are applications that work on a similar basis to scripts hackers in that they test all know exploits and attempt to compromise your site using some of the previously mentioned methods such as SQL Injection.