A lot of people believe their websites are secure and hackers won’t target them. They survive on the belief that they have too small a company to hack. The time has come to do away with such hypotheses and consider ways to cure their website.
Internet attackers aren’t always targeting specific pages. Most attacks are triggered by bots that don’t care who you are, or what your website or company does. Determining whether you are infected by scanning your website is the first step in protecting malware like bots, trojans, worms and viruses again, to mention a few.
Imperva, a web security company, points out that half of all website visitors are bots and that the malicious intent of attacking your website is almost 29 per cent. Furthermore, the finding revealed that the less traffic a website gets, the more likely it will get targeted. Proving that bad bots will not only target any website irrespective of its intent but have no reservations about whether or not it is a heavily visited site. We need to understand that bots are not human but are impartial automated website attacks with the primary purpose of breaching websites and which their amount of managed websites.
Example of a Bot Hack
Honeynet, a national, non-profit security research organisation, recently developed a honeypot to monitor security attacks on a cloud-based web server. This was running on a barebones instance of Amazon Web Services ( AWS). It had no domain name, nor did it run services that would be beneficial to someone else. Using Wireshark, the best network traffic analysis tool currently available, they started collecting network packets for a 24-hour time frame shortly after the server started. Following this, Wireshark analysed the packet capture file; p0f, a passive fingerprinting application for TCP / IP traffic; and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) rating API of the Network Incident Response Center (CIRCL).
In a matter of 24 hours, more than a quarter of a million times this anonymous and almost invisible Web server was under attack. So this example is a wake-up call to start locking the website down.
Most of those attacks have been carried out through Secure Shell ( SSH). Researchers then opened a honeypot to collect data on the attacks. A honeypot refers to a server built only to look like a real web site. The researchers agreed to open the Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( HTTP) for the Internet, SSH, and also the Telecommunications Network (Telnet) protocol for attacks to keep the project workable.
HTTP
Most of the numbers of HTTP attacks took place on PHPMyadmin, a well-known remote management framework for MySQL and MariaDB. Those databases rely on a variety of web content management systems. There was also constant assault on weak WordPress plugins. It should be remembered that this was achieved on a device that hadn’t even in honeypot mode transmitted a single packet to the outside world.
Telnet
For setup and management some IoT gadgets use Telnet. That is basically calling for hacking of your computers.
SSH
As for SSH, an the number of attacks were brute-force assaults running over the entire range of TCP ports via lists of frequently used passwords and usernames, 1-65535.
Conclusion
Imperva has figured out that one in three visitors to the website is, in fact, an attack bot. Imperva and Holberton also found that the patterns of attack reported for SSH and HTTP depended on generic exploit attempts which appeared to scan various IP addresses for common vulnerabilities. By brute forcing with variations of default usernames and passwords Telnet relied on far simpler intrusion methods.
Botnets and bots directly impel these attacks to target any or any of the sites they find. These automated hackers search for vulnerable and poor websites.
Therefore it is important that you use fundamental security rules to protect your website. Some of those fundamental rules are listed below:
- Use firewalls to block all ports to your website except those which you use
- Disable all programmes oriented to the Internet unless you need them
- Keep the apps up to date and patchy
- Check Malware Targets Websites
- Update your site as soon as a new version or extension of the content management system ( CMS) is accessible