What are the Common Types of Website Attacks?
Are you afraid of losing your website to hackers on the internet? If, not then there is every reason to be worried, especially with the current cybersecurity environment. According to recent reports, over 64% of attacks targeting businesses are web-based with denial of service attacks and direct hacks being the most common.
Suffering a web attack could be devastating to any business especially if they rely on their website for online sales and marketing. The following five attack methods have been identified in the recent past as the most potent and common website attack methods:
1. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (Good Old DDoS)
This website attack method has been around for many years that it no longer attracts coverage despite its lingering presence and potency. As its name might suggest, a distributed denial-of-service attack typically involves an external malicious entity commanding armies of devices using a botnet to bombard your web server with requests. This kind of attack will most certainly restrict access to your website or bring it down completely in severe cases.
Why DDoS Attacks Are Still Common and Effective
Denial of service was, not so long ago, a favorite attack method used by criminals hired to bring down a competitor’s web servers. However, today’s DDoS attacks could be a sign of more nefarious activity going on the background such as complete database threats and other direct breaches.
Some attackers will resort to a simple denial of service attack on your website to distract you as they plan and launch more serious attacks on critical targets such as your company servers and network resources.
Defending Against DDoS Attacks - Stopping this common attack method is quite straightforward if you have the right resources at your disposal. After vulnerability and performance assessment, your security team can put all your website’s resources behind a secured content delivery network like Cloudflare. Another method involves better web server configuration and enhanced security to identify and block suspicious traffic.
2. Database Attacks (SQL Injection and Direct Password Leaks)
Database attacks targeting websites have grown in popularity in the last few years. Not a year passes without news of a major breach that saw millions of user account details stolen and published or sold in the dark market. Database attacks can be as simple as traditional SQL injection and as complex as direct sustained breaches and insider leaks.
Why Database Attacks Are Still Common and Effective
Gaining access to a website’s databases is in every hacker’s dream because of the level of control it can give them over web assets. Imagine an E-commerce website that keeps data on millions of items and customer accounts.
This kind of data is very marketable in the underground markets and often fetches a premium price. Sadly, most webmasters take a casual approach to securing the website databases. At the same time, some popularly used content management systems such as WordPress do tend to suffer from database vulnerabilities from time to time.
Defending Against Database Attacks - The first step towards securing your website’s databases is to have your entire website scanned for vulnerabilities. Sometimes, you might have weak spots in the queries used to fetch data on your website and display it on the frontend. In some instances, the database vulnerability could be as a result of a bigger breach affecting the platform you are using.
At the end of the assessment, you should have a plan to remove all the loopholes in configuration, remove badly written queries and backend code and encrypt your databases.
3. XSS Attacks (Cross-Site Scripting)
Cross-site scripting involves a malicious entity successfully adding or embedding JavaScript snippets or attack scripts on your website without your knowledge. These scripts could do anything from denying access to certain parts of your website to stealing user data. Some serious XSS attacks would take control of your entire website and use it to spread malware or launch other attacks on your visitors or other websites within your server if you are using shared hosting.
Defending against XSS scripting - If you have suffered an XSS attack, then you will need to have your website scanned for malware and other scripts before implementing defense mechanisms such as user validation and input validation. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, you may also want to have your extensions checked for malicious code.
All in all, securing a website should be a proactive undertaking that involves many activities such as scanning, monitoring performance and finding fixes on time. A simple breach could see hackers take control of your entire website and steal all your data. Stay secure!
