Web defacement is one of the most significant security challenges for organisations operating online. Globally, over 50,000 websites fall victim to defacement each day. Typically, web defacement is done by hackers who break into a web server and replace the hosted website with one of their own, using techniques such as phishing, code injection, and cross-site scripting. Common targets of defacement include religious websites, government websites, bank websites, and corporate websites. When web defacement occurs and the news spreads faster than the affected organisation can react, it can have a substantial impact on its reputation.
While there are currently no software or hardware solutions that can ensure 100% protection against web defacement, there are best practices that can prevent or mitigate the problem.
Here are some best practices that address the issue of web defacements:
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Fortify Your Defences with a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
If you have a public website, ensure it is not left vulnerable. While SSL and HTTPS are essential, they are not sufficient to protect against cyber-attacks. Minimally, you should install a web firewall or WAF in front of your website. This adds an important layer of defence against unwanted hacks and attacks. Many affordable WAFs can be found on the internet and your web hosting company should have add-ons for WAF as well.
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Proactively Monitor Your Website for Hacks
While a WAF will block out most of the common cyber-attacks, it is not able to ensure 100% protection all the time due to the changing nature of hacks. To stay ahead, complement your WAF with a good monitoring tool. This tool checks for hacks, defacements, or script changes in addition to your website uptime and response time.
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Conduct Regular Security Audits and Penetration Testing
Hackers are always trying to exploit vulnerabilities that are not patched or configured properly. The vulnerability could be in the operating system (eg. Windows), the content management system (eg. WordPress), or in the web server (eg. nginx or IIS). Regular security checks are required to ensure there are no security misconfigurations or existing security vulnerabilities. This can be done either before launching your website or at regular intervals (eg. weekly or monthly) to ensure your website is patched properly and does not have open security vulnerabilities. For more important web applications, it is highly recommended to engage security consultants to do penetration testing as well.
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Be Prepared to Respond to Hacking or Defacement incidents
When an unfortunate hack or defacement happens, your website may be down, and you will need to find a way to fix the security vulnerabilities and restore them in the fastest way possible. Thus, it is essential to be prepared to respond to these incidents. Firstly, ensure that you back up your website and critical data regularly. Secondly, prepare a temporary landing website or create a secondary site that looks like the original. Be very careful of re-defacements as statistics have shown that this happens more than 50% of the time due to security loopholes being present in the backup. Thirdly, work out and practice an incident handling and recovery process so that your cyber defence can be comprehensive and robust. If we are well prepared, the restoration time can be in minutes rather than in days or weeks.
Conclusion
The threat of web defacement is real, and its consequences can be significant. Web defacement can result in damage to a site’s reputation, loss of valuable information and user privacy, loss of money, and loss of time. Hence it needs to be prevented before it happens. By following the best practices mentioned above, an organisation can better protect its digital assets and greatly reduce the chances of being hacked or defaced.