Every minute 19 people in the U.S. fall victim to attacks to their websites.

But wait, first of all: what’s “being hacked” means?

Being hacked means that someone has gained access to your website files without your permission. There are many things a hacker might do once they are inside your website:

* Steal personal information like client data and credit card details

* Remove your content and your access and hold you to ransom to return it

* Add links to their own site to increase traffic to the website or to help SEO (this could be by inserting links into your existing copy or by adding popups)

* Add Malware that could attack computers that view your website

* Communicate a political message

* Just vandalize your website for fun

* Use the site to generate mass spam emails

“Out of all the websites we’ve scanned, 75 percent of them have a vulnerability on the first scan,” said Ainsley Braun, co-founder and CEO at Tinfoil Security which specializes in website security.

Every website out there can be a victim to an attack, it doesn’t matter if you have a huge and important website, or if you have a small one. Hackers don’t distinguish.

You know why?

Most hacking is actually carried out by a series of automated bots developed by hackers to crawl through the internet looking for vulnerabilities in code or infrastructure.

Here are some of the most dangerous kinds of attacks on websites:

Insecure cookies:

Every time you log into a website, your computer receives a small piece of data called a cookie—information about your user session so you do not need to log in again when you visit a new page. If the website does not secure that cookie, your data is vulnerable.

A hacker can gain access to a cookie on an unsecured wireless network and hijack a user’s website session, potentially gaining access to private data.

Cross-site scripting:

Another kind of dangerous website attack occurs when it’s unclear if the user is browsing the authentic website or a fake site that’s masquerading as the real thing. This type of attack is called cross-site scripting.

The attack starts once you click on a malicious link, which redirects traffic to the attacker’s site. Cybercriminals then take advantage of users who are unaware they’ve been forwarded to a malicious site and innocently give up their username, password, and potentially other bits of personal information.

The effects of cross-site scripting can be lasting.

in some cases, cross-site scripting has been used to actually install malware on users’ computers and thus maintain sort of a persistent attack on a user.

Database injection:

This can be one of the most lethal kind of website attack. 

What an attacker can do with a database injection basically is rather than simply using the website to insert their own data, they could actually trick the database into dumping out all of the other customer data.

To summarise, everyone can be a victim of this kind of attacks. But there’s a way to prevent them, some of them are small actions that you can take by yourself like:

Changing your password every time and then (and not using the same one for every website).

Taking care of connecting your devices to public networks.

Checking if the website you’re going to visit is secure.

And if you own a website you can save yourself worries and time by having an expert to help you find and fix your vulnerabilities.

Companies that protect their data scan their websites every day in order to find if they have any vulnerabilities or issues. It is better to find those problems by yourself before someone else does and use them to break into your website.

If you are interested make sure to check our “have I been hacked” detection service. We have helped multiple companies and we have been working in this industry for years.

Our only job is to keep you safe.

All the best,

The team at OnlineHackScan.