Three Web Security Resolutions Available This Year
Three Web Security Resolutions Available This Year
With an economic rebound that is occurring potentially on the horizon, business owners will be calculating and thinking about growth strategies for this 2021. The pressure will definitely be on the high side than previous years, due to post covid recovery hurdles.
After a swift mass migration to remote work over the last year, many companies may now be largely very confident in their new infrastructures – despite them having one or two shortcuts taken with security to speed up the digital transformation.
Kris Lovejoy, EY Global Cybersecurity Leader and the former CISO of IBM opened up that in response to the pandemic, “ about 84% of the world had to introduce some work from home capability, and 60% introduced technology that will enable them to function, and 60% of those either abbreviated or skipped completely the security checks as part of that implementation.”
With new vaccines in town and an economic rebound potentially on the horizon, businesses will now be experimenting with growth strategies for the 2021. However, it is really critical that they have to double, and triple check to be sure they have the right security measures in place for a growth in trajectory.
The most famous and common security web question going into the new year will still be the same as: ‘What is my probability of getting breached?’
Websites are being hacked typically when they are processing vulnerable plugins that aren’t well patched. Despite all the too-common myth of WordPress Core as a point of weakness, it’s the third-party plugin vulnerabilities that still represent about 55.9% of the known entry points for attacks. (By analogy, you can run a check, by considering the confidence of Android’s security versus the known vulnerability of apps that are on the Play Store.) However, this represents just only half of the equation - the other half is known to be proper management of WordPress accounts, especially through using a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) plugin.
1. Avoid Running Any More Plugins Than The Exact Ones
The solution is very simple: you should avoid running any more plugins than the exact ones, you need to ensure that the ones you are making use of have a very good history of updates and patches after published vulnerabilities.
For you to tackle the burden of keeping plugins up to date and also the risk of machine learning, mission critical sites breaking, and visual testing tools can now even automate plugin updates on a weekly or nightly basis without it causing unintended consequences that could result in a lost traffic or a downtime. Make sure the admin access is limited to “must have” users and also make sure they are using the MFA.
2. Build The Right Team
The skills gap of the security is well-documented by now: about 653,000 businesses (48%) have a basic skills gap, according to the DCMS. Meaning that, the people in charge of cybersecurity in those businesses are lacking the confidence to carry out the kinds of basic tasks that is laid out in the government-endorsed Cyber Essentials scheme. They also are not getting any support from the external cyber security providers. The pandemic has since made that gap worse as remote workforces move to the cloud environments without the cloud security expertise to assess the risks of that move.
To ensure that you have the right team in place, you should start drawing out the risk profile that is unique to your business to be on a safer side. Identify your risk, WordPress, security and ecommerce experts and also you should consider how your industry poses some particular challenges, such as the healthcare sector websites, which have without doubt experienced different types of traffic surges in this year.
For those weighing between training and hiring more in-house staff or even bringing on a vendor, they should revisit the basics of vendor management and how you are drawing the lines of responsibility, though it should be depending on who fits where in your security puzzle. If you have a partner that you are working with, they will need to have made those investments into technology and skills on your behalf.
3. Prepare For The Peaks
For ecommerce platforms and the retailers, seasonal shopping periods which are major such as Boxing Day, Christmas, and January sales pose a tricky challenge. Website managers will be scrambling and struggling to meet a high volume of revenue-driving activity on their site while at the same time trying to tackle an increase in cyberattacks such as the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which have already been major concern, doubling every quarter this year. During this vast period for cybercriminals, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has already done an update of its guidance for the good of online shoppers.
Load testing, which is a way to check performance testing that simulates real-world loads on applications, software, or websites, can help you answer the question of ‘how many people can visit my site at once?’ Proper load testing can also help site managers to be able to assess things like lifecycle hooks, scaling capabilities, automatic code deployment, susceptibility to DDoS attacks due to high load, health checks and target tracking. Without you having a proper planning and action, retailers are at an increased risk of a successful DDoS attacks that can lead to a significant revenue loss.
Relevant Courses and Certification
Computer Security Course and Certificate
Information Security and Cyber Law Course and Certificate
Internet/Cyber Security Course and Certificate
Network Security Course and Certificate
Wireless Security Course and Certificate
