How to Prevent Your Website from Hackers?

Nowadays, it’s really important to keep your website up-to-date, as everyday countless hackers are targeting websites to steal important information from websites and servers. This is a very serious concern, and now I am sharing few guidelines to secure your websites and web servers from being hacked.

Old scripts

Please remember that old installations are an open invitation for hackers. So, if you have installed Joomla or WordPress that you tried out a couple of months ago; please remove it. You should make sure that any script you install on your servers is of the latest version. It takes 5 seconds to hack an old version of Joomla, upload a shell script and have total control over your account.

Passwords

Never use easy to guess passwords or the same password more than once; if someone finds a password of yours they will try it everywhere else until they reach success. If someone finds your webmail password you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll try it elsewhere – maybe in cPanel, maybe on your online banking!

Cloak Your Folders

You should keep a blank index.html in all of the folders inside your public_html; this will make sure the contents can’t be easily viewed on the internet. CPanel has this function, check out ‘Index Manager’. It’s always a good idea to keep your files and folders secret.

Password Protect Your Admin Folder

You should password protect the admin folder of any scripts you are using, this provides an extra layer of security and is highly recommended. You can do this in cPanel by clicking the Directory Protection link.

So You Got Hacked?

If you got clicked that something has happened, maybe some spam was sent from your account, or you found you were hosting a phishing site, the first step you need to take is changing your passwords. All of them – cPanel, email, site admin passwords, everything.

Next up, go through your web space and remove all old script installations, remember if you installed plugins in your scripts (modules for Joomla/WordPress etc) they can be hacked too! Make sure they’re up-to-date too.

You can check the Error Logs in cPanel for suspicious requests. Generally, a hacker leaves suspicious files around, so look for such files within your public_html folder. Once the files are found, take the details of those files, such as date and time that the file was uploaded, the file name, folder it was in, and inform your web host so they can check through. Then delete the files.

Being hacked can happen to anyone at all, your security will always depend on its weakest point. If you don’t keep things up-to-date and secure, your site will be hacked and be used for criminal activity in one way or another – however, now is the perfect time to stop this from happening.

It is becoming more popular for hackers to try to brute force attack your Joomla administrator to gain access to your administrator. Using this method they bombard your admin form with thousands of usernames/password until they find the right combination. Since Joomla doesn’t let you choose the admin username when installing they already know the username, this makes it twice as easy. If you want to add additional security, and who doesn’t, it is fortunately very easy.

#1: Change the admin username

The first thing to do is change the default admin username. First login to your control panel (often cPanel) and go to your database editor (normally phpMyAdmin), then select the Joomla database and browse to the jos_users table. The original user is user id 62, so edit that entry. Pick a username other than “admin”. Doing just this step will stop almost any chance of being hacked since most will just try the default username.

#2: Choose a better admin password

Now you’ll need to have an admin password that is difficult to guess. You’ll want to have at least 8 characters with a mix of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and special characters.

#3: Use .htaccess protection

With .htaccess protection there will be 2 logins needed to get into your Joomla admin. BuyHTTP’s Joomla hosting accounts are protected by a firewall that automatically blocks would-be hackers after 5 failed login attempts. .htaccess protection can be enabled by logging in to cPanel (or your hosts control panel) and clicking the Password Protect a Directory button. You can then select the “public_html/administrator” directory to protect, and add users who you want to be able to login.

These few, easy steps will exponentially increase the security of your Joomla installation.