Why is important to protect your website?

EP Systems knows that you may not think there is any need for you to protect your website, but you would be very wrong and you may be putting your online business at risk. The phenomenon of “website hijacking” (the stealing of other peoples website or content) has been around for a long time but is still on the increase.

Website content is hijacked for three main reasons:

1. To copy the content onto another website (or even to copy the design / layout itself)

2. To harvest email addresses to be used to send spam to.

3. To discover / steal payment links so that site payment mechanisms can be circumvented and product, in effect, stolen.

Perhaps the most common of the above is the harvesting of email addresses by so called spam bots. These bots can navigate your site, read the content, identify all the email addresses contained within the content and store them in databases so they can later be bombarded with spam email. This is crucial in protecting the identites of your clients by stopping this form of attack.

The second most common is the harvesting (i.e. stealing) of content so it can be re-used on other sites. It may just be the content that is stolen or it may be the entire site including design, layout, menus etc. Although this may seem like a back handed compliment the theft of your hard work should not be tolerated (and having too much duplicate content around the web may harm your search engine rankings !).

The least common, but perhaps most worrying is the stealing of payment links so that they can be circumvented and sales or commissions stolen. This form of attack is harder to accomplish, but can be performed by the saviest of code breakers (i.e. hackers). This should not be overlooked. Especially if you are running a commercial storefront on your website. All related to your network security of your hosting account.

What can be done to stop all this madness?

There are several methods of protecting your code in order to prevent theft, these include the use of various scripts (usually JavaScript) to prevent right click functionality and hence prevent users viewing site source code. Although somewhat effective, this method does not prevent the use of automatic software (or bots) to harvest content or the savy code breaker we mentioned earlier.

The best way to prevent this is to encrypt the html source code.

The phrase “encrypt html source code” may conjure up fear in many people as it sounds very complicated, but in reality EP Systems have developed in-house proprietary software for html encryption. We can encrypt new client designs or encrypt websites already developed and hosted with either 128 Bit up to 1024 Bit based on the AES Standard (Advanced Encryption Standard). Only the web browser (Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Safari) can interpret the code and present the website the way it is intended to be viewed. Most browsers can handle 128 Bit up to 1024 Bit. Some browsers can handle 3072 Bit (Opera)....Our HTML Encryption Service is an easy process we can perform for your business and will not interfere with your SEO protocols....

CLICK TO VIEW CODING EXAMPLE:

  

How can you take the next security step?

Contact our office and we can do a free security evaluation of your site. After the initial consultation, if you wish to proceed in securing your website. We will send a quote for the optimization.

 

 

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