6 Tips To Secure Your Website | How to secure your website - Palance Root

6 Tips To Secure Your Website

The majority of individuals on the internet are good and honest. Some internet users, on the other hand, find it amusing to poke around websites and look for security flaws. In the most basic ways, a few easy tips can assist you in securing your website. Obviously, data security is a sophisticated topic that is much beyond the scope of this post. However, I'll go over the absolute essentials of what one should do, which will eliminate a lot of potential issues that could lead to individuals seeing stuff they shouldn't.

Password Protecting Directories

If you have a directory on your server that you want to keep hidden, don't count on people guessing the name. It's preferable to password-protect the folder on the server. Because the Apache server powers over half of all websites, let's look at how to password protect a directory on Apache.

The.htaccess file in the directory is where Apache receives configuration commands. Unless a specific sub-folder has its own.htaccess file, the commands in.htaccess affect the entire folder and any sub-folders within it. Apache also uses a file called.htpasswd to password-protect a folder. The names and passwords of users who have been allowed access are stored in this file. Because the passwords are encrypted, you must use the htpasswd application to generate them. To use it, navigate to your server's command line and type htpasswd. If you get a "command not found" problem, you should contact your system administrator. Also, many web providers offer web-based methods for securing directories, so they may have things set up for you to do it that way rather than on your own. Let's move on if this isn't the case.

"htpasswd -c.htpasswd myusername" means "htpasswd -c.htpasswd myusername," where "myusername" is the desired username. After that, you'll be required to enter a password. Once you've confirmed it, the file will be produced. FTP can be used to double-check this. Also, if the file is in your web folder, you should relocate it to a location where it is not visible to the public. Now you'll need to open or create your.htaccess file. Include the following items inside:

AuthUserFile /home/www/passwd/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "Secure Folder" AuthType Basic

require valid-user

Adjust the directory path on the first line to the location of your.htpasswd file. When you access that folder on your website once you've set this up, you'll see a popup dialogue. To access it, you will need to log in.

Turn Off Directory Listings

Any directory on your website that doesn't have a recognised homepage file (index.htm, index.php, default.htm, etc.) will display a list of all the files in that folder by default. It's possible that you don't want everyone to see all you have on there. To protect against this, simply create a blank file, name it index.htm, and upload it to the appropriate folder. The second solution is to disable directory listing using the.htaccess file once more. Simply include the line "Options -Indexes" in the file to accomplish this. Instead of a list of files, users will now receive a 403 error..

Remove Install Files

Many software and scripts come with installation and/or upgrade scripts when you install them on your website. Leaving these on your server creates a significant security risk since if someone else is familiar with the software, they may locate and run your install/upgrade scripts, resetting your whole database, config files, and so on. Before allowing you to utilise the software, a well-written software package will tell you to remove these elements. However, double-check that this has been done. Simply erase the files from your server's hard drive.

Keep Up with Security Updates

Those who run software packages on their websites must stay up to speed on software upgrades and security alerts. If you don't, you're leaving yourself vulnerable to hackers. In truth, many times a serious security flaw is discovered and disclosed, yet it takes a long time for the software's designer to deliver a patch. If you do not upgrade, anyone who is so inclined can find your site using the programme and exploit the vulnerability. I've been burned a few times by this, with entire threads being destroyed and needing to recover from backup. It happens all the time.

Reduce Your Error Reporting Level

Errors and warnings generated by PHP are, by default, printed with full information to your browser, which is what I work in. The issue is that these errors frequently provide complete directory paths to the scripts in question. It divulges far too much data. Reduce PHP's error reporting level to relieve this. This can be accomplished in two ways. One option is to make changes to your php.ini file. This is the primary PHP setup on your server. Look for the directives error reporting and display errors. If you don't have access to this file (as many people on shared hosting don't), you can use PHP's error reporting() function to lessen the level of error reporting. Include this in a global file for all of your scripts so that it works everywhere.

Secure Your Forms

If you don't correctly code your forms, hackers can gain access to your server. Because these forms are frequently uploaded to a script on your server, which may have access to your database, a form that isn't protected can provide a hacker direct access to everything. Keep in mind that just because an address form has the word "Address" in front of it does not mean you can trust users to fill it up with their address. Assume your form and the script it submits to are both incorrectly coded. What's to stop a hacker from typing a SQL query or scripting code into that field? With that in mind, here are some things to do and keep an eye out for:

Make use of MaxLength. The maxlength property in HTML can be used to limit the length of input on forms in input fields. This can be used to prevent individuals from submitting WAY too much information. Most people will be put off by this. Because a hacker can get around it, you must also protect against information overrun at the script level.

Emails can be hidden. If you're using a form-to-mail script, leave the email address out of the form. It defeats the purpose, because spam crawlers will still be able to locate your email address

Validate your forms with form validation. I won't go into a programming tutorial right now, but any script that a form submits to should validate the data it receives. Make sure the fields you've received are the ones you expected. Verify that the incoming data is of an acceptable and expected length, as well as that it is in the correct format (in the case of emails, phones, zips, etc.)

SQL Injection should be avoided. SQL injection is a topic for another article, but the essentials are that form input is permitted to be injected directly into a SQL query without validation, allowing a hacker the ability to run SQL queries through your online form. To avoid this, always check the data type of incoming data (numbers, strings, etc. ), run proper form validation as described above, and construct queries in such a way that a hacker cannot insert anything into the form that would cause the query to behave in an unexpected way.

Conclusion:

Website security is a complex topic that becomes much more complicated than this. However, I've provided you a general overview of some of the more straightforward things you can do on your website to mitigate the bulk of dangers.