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If the internet has proved itself as a source of entertainment, international trade and knowledge, then it has also attracted hackers, spammers and other types of online criminal activities. Everyday a large number of web sites are hacked with the intuition of stealing the private data of companies, stealing credit card information, unethically discovering customer details and similar kinds of illicit activities. It is therefore important to keep the web pages secured 24×7.

To make the web a secure place to work, various tools are being designed everyday. There are different types of firewalls, anti-root kits, anti-virus, anti-spam tools available in the market. One can make judicious use of all of them as per his/her needs and network infrastructure. Besides these tools there are other methodologies also which should be considered while securing the web pages online. For example:

• Disabling the Guest account: Most of the Windows servers have a guest account by default. This account gives the users limited access to the server’s resources but as it does not asks for password anyone can log into the server and try to infiltrate the data somehow.

• Don’t forget to rename the Administrator’s Account: By default the Windows server assigns ‘administrator’ as the user name for the administrator account which has all the powers and access to all the resources. If you don’t rename this account then half the work has been already done for the hacker. Now he has to guess only the password.

• Take your passwords to the heights of complexity and ambiguity: The passwords should always be very, very complex. You can set a strong password policy for your servers to avoid successful password guess by the hacker.

• Disable the unwanted protocols: Not all the protocols running in the background are needed all the time. Thus it is recommended that all the unwanted protocols must be disabled as these protocols open up different communication ports on the network. For example if the Telnet protocol is enabled unnecessary then the hacker may get successful in establishing a remote connection with your server.

• Use SSL: SSL (Secured socket Layer) is a protocol which is developed to promote web security. It allows the use of a large number of encryption methods.

• Use SHTTP: SHTTP is a short for Secure Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It is an extension of the standard HTTP protocol and is different from the SSL but is used for the same purpose; to deliver secured web pages.

• Use Certificates: Certificates can be used in order to ensure leak proof transactions over the web. It features user authentication. They are digitally signed electronic documents which verify the connection between a server’s encryption scheme and the server’s identification. All the digital signatures, cryptographic functions and trust policies are defined while issuing the certificates and they are issued by the third parties known as Certificate Authorities. In order to get a certificate for a web site one has to get registered with this authority. The digital certificate which is then issued is unique.

OK, you have created the world’s best web site which has got breath taking designs and extraordinary multimedia effects, but the bottom line is you have to publish it on the World Wide Web (WWW, popularly known as the Internet) so that it can been viewed by the public. As soon as your web site gets published online, it is ready to be a victim of the BAD internet. Your files and folders are prone to a large number of internet security threats. The fact is that certain aspects of the web sites cannot be protected. There is no single day till now on which all the web pages on the internet were free from viruses, spams, trojans or hacking attempts. If you are connected to a huge computer network such as internet, you are 100% exposed to malicious activities and thus, ‘Play At Your Own Risk’ is recommended.

Try to be safe up to the maximum possible level:

In order to be safe, the first and foremost thing required is that you should know about the types of internet threats as much as possible. The most dangerous and fatal practices used to destroy HTML files on the web are:

• Data theft in the form of pishing, hacking, spamming, spoofing etc.
• Destruction of HTML files and folders stored on the web server.
• Modification of the contents of the HTML documents.
• Hacking the complete web server.
• Different types of viruses on the network.

Carefully design a protection plan:

Once you have got to know about the possible online threats, the next step is to carefully analyze and design a protection plan for the HTML files residing on the web server. Following are some basic guidelines which can assist you in making a protection plan.

• Carefully separate the most important data from that which is not too much sensitive.
• After that examine and decide the level of protection needed for different types of data i.e. from the important ones to the casual ones.
• Examine the value of your web site on the internet. Analyze the page ranks of your HTML documents. This will let you know about up to what extent your web site can attract the hackers.
• Do consider the time, effort and money which you can spend for implementing, maintaining and upgrading the protection system for your web site in advance and proceed accordingly.
• Carefully choose the best possible company which can offer you the world class internet security services at an affordable cost.

Choose form a number of options to secure your data:

There are numerous of options available in the market which can be effectively combined to make a high-tech security system. The most internet security tools are anti-virus software, firewalls (both hardware and software), anti-pishing, anti-spamming and anti-spoofing systems, password protection, alarms, log maintainers, network intrusion detectors etc.