How to Make Sure that Your Web Application is Secure?

In modern times, there have been several incidents of websites being attacked or compromised. Security is one of the most ignored yet important aspects of your web application. For many weeks or months it will work fine but on that one day when it is compromised, you will definitely regret of not paying proper attention to its security.

Whether you are a web application development company or not, there are many types of data which is flowing through your IT architecture which needs urgent protection. This data may be used by some web application which may be exposing you to security threats.
In 2017 was famous for the Wanna Cry Ransomware attack that took hundred thousands of computers hostages and did millions of dollars of losses in more than 150 countries. We can still witness such kind of attacks in future also and the best way to prevent them is to do something for it right now. In this article we will be discussing about the professional advice for optimizing your website security and how to avoid hacking attempts. Below are the top tips to help you and your web application safe and secure.

Keep Making Regular Software Updates Strictly on Time

Although it is very simple thing to do and understand but making all of your software up to date is very important in keeping you web application safe and secure. That means all of the software like your server operating system and also the software you may be running on your website such as CMS or a forum should be uptodate. If there remains a hole or a vulnerability in your software, hackers can attempt to use it to launch a hacking attack on your site or web application. If you are using a managed hosting solution then you don’t need to apply the security updates for the operating system and some of the softwares as the hosting company will take care of all of this. But if you know, detect or came across any of such vulnerability in any software then you should inform the hosting provider as soon as possible. If you are using third party software on your website such as a CMS or forum then you should make sure that you apply any security patches quickly.

Take Care for SQL Injection Attacks

When developing web apps it is important to make it SQL injection proof. SQL injection attacks happen when an attacker uses a text field or URL parameter to gain access to or manipulate your database. If you use the standard SQL then it is mostly possible to insert malicious code into your query which could be used to change tables, get information and delete data. You can prevent these attacks by using parameterised queries which is not much difficult to implement.

Use HTTPS

HTTPS is a protocol which is used to provide security over the internet. HTTPS makes sure that the users are interacting with the server as expected and that nobody else is able to intercept or change the content they are seeing in the transmission process. If you have some data which your users want as private then it is highly recommended to use only HTTPS to deliver it. This can be the credit card information of login pages information. Generally a login form set a cookie, for example, which is sent with every other request to your site which a logged in user makes and it is used to authenticate those requests. If a hacker steals it then he will be able to easily imitate a user and take over their login session. To avoid these kind of attacks, you should always use HTTPS for your entire site. Also Google have announced that they will give higher search engine ranking to HTTPS websites thus giving an SEO benefit to it.

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Validate on Both Sides i.e on Browser and Server Side

Validation should always be done at both i.e. on the web browser and the server side. The browser generally can catch the simple failures like compulsory fields which are empty and also when you enter a text into a numbers only field. But these can be bypassed and the hacker can use it to compromise your website. Hence you should make sure that you check for these validations and deeper validations on server side also as failing to do so could lead to malicious code or scripting code being inserted into the database or it could lead to undesirable results in your web application.

Conclusion

Recently we have witnessed several hacking attacks which spread over the Internet quite fast and did millions of dollars of losses to the governments and organizations worldwide. Therefore it becomes utmost important to follow the above given tips if you want to prevent the hacking attempts on your website or web application. Doing regular updates of your web server operating system and other softwares on your websites, encrypting the important information, using HTTPS, checking error messages so that they don’t leak important information, making passwords more complex, preventing SQL injection attacks and implementing proper validations at both the web browser and web server side will make sure that your website or web application is secured and any malicious code will not be able to steal your users information from the database and neither it will affect the outcome and the performance of your website or web application.