Basics of Online Security

Imagine walking out of your front door and leaving it open, whilst you jet off on holiday for a week. Or parking your car in central London and leaving all of the windows open and your laptop on the front seat. Or even walking around town with your wallet hanging out of nfl jersey your pocket and your iPod on so loud that you couldn't hear an airplane, let alone a pick pocket walking behind you.

You are probably thinking, "Why would I do that, I am not stupid! ".
It is true to say, the majority of us would never do any of the things mentioned in my opening paragraph, because they are the basic security measures of life. Lock your front door, keep your windows closed when away and don't leave anything worth pinching in your car.

As you begin to wonder where this article is going, lets take the same situation, but for our websites.

Everyone has a website, wants a website or is keen to know more about someone else's website. Imagine each website as a house, each search engine as a city and all of the web visitors as people walking around. Some of these people want to do you harm, they want to break into your house, or in this case, your website. It is no different to life in the "real" world. The majority of the people are good, but there are some that do mean you harm and will try every method, tip and tick going to bring you down.

Internet crime is one of football jerseys the fast growing crimes in the global world as we know it. Everyday we see websites get hacked, passwords stolen and viruses hidden via iframe injections that will come along and do you, your visitors and probably your reputation great damage.

In my opinion, you can never be 100% secure, and anyone that claims to be is either lying or has spent thousands of pounds on security measures that the majority of us can not afford. But you can make sure you are as secure as you can possibly be by implementing a few security measures, and these are described below.

Virus Protection – Security starts at home, and by this I mean make sure you are running a first class security suite on your home pc's and laptops. I use Mcafee, but there are others including AVG and Norton, but just make sure you use a well recommended internet security suite which if you do get infected, will help protect and fix any problems. Also download Malwarebytes and run this on a periodic basis. The latest Virus programs can now also fix infected webpages, meaning you can save hours by letting them fix the issues should your site get infected.

FTP Passwords – Every week, change your FTP password. Yes, this is a pain and you probably won't do it, but it can be the one thing that stops your site from being hacked. Some of the latest viruses steal FTP passwords from your pc and then send them to the bad world, so by changing the password periodically, even if they do steal your data, it will be another layer in protection for you.
Security Patches – Make sure your computer is patched. Many of nfl jerseys the Trojans and exploits are coming through on un-patched or older systems. Make sure you allow Windows to update when it needs to and just to be on the safe side, check for updates once a week, even if you have it on automatic.