As a business owner, you owe it to your customers to ensure your website is secure. While it is impossible to stop every single threat, it is possible to stop the serious ones. However, in order to protect your website, you first need to understand its weaknesses. You can do this with a vulnerability assessment. Here are the steps to take to properly assess the vulnerable areas of your website.
Know Your Website Risks
You should begin with getting more familiar with your website. Learn how it works. Find out what kinds of security are already in place and how they offer protection. Then, learn about cyber threats. Find out how hackers get into secure areas and what kinds of damage they do. Try to find out as much as you can. The better you know your website and the possible risks it faces, the better you will be able to seek out vulnerabilities.
Detail Your Business Processes
You should have a detailed explanation of who accesses your website from your business and who controls the information flowing through your website. Know what procedures you have in place to ensure only authorized individuals have access to sensitive information. Define how you store information and what information you store. All of these things will play a role in how secure your website is.
Have an Assessment Done
Once you have gathered all the information about your website and related policies and procedures, you are ready to have the site looked at by a professional. A professional will use vulnerability assessment tools to find weak areas of your site. Once the risks are identified, the professional can help you to fix them and find solutions to increase the security of your site.
On Site
In addition to assessing your website, your hardware also needs to be looked at. You will want to go through the steps again of identifying who has access, how they access it and the procedures you have in place to monitor access and restrict it. Sometimes the biggest risks are offline. If you have a system that is not restricted and anyone with a password can access it, then you have a huge risk of being compromised.
One of the top things you can do is restrict access to only essential personnel. The fewer people that have access, the better. Ideally, if you are a small business, it would only be you and one manager with access. Another important thing to do is improve passwords. Make sure they are strong and not easy to hack. The top rule when it comes to passwords is that they should be impersonal.
When it comes to vulnerability assessment, it is well worth your time to do it. You should always work with a professional in order to get the best protection and identify all the weaknesses. You don’t want your employees’ or customers’ information falling into the hands of a criminal, so it is up to you to ensure your website and other business systems are as secure as possible and not easily hacked.