Tips For Business And Personal Web Server Protection

Business or personal dedicated web server can be used for several applications. The most common of these is the running of a hosting system for your websites they are also often used to run online games, store data remotely and for running of certain web applications.

Why We Need Web Server Security

The bottom line is that your business or dedicated personal servers are probably going to be storing and running quite a bit of pretty important information. Because of this, you’d better make sure you keep them secure from attacks, hacks and destructive accidents.

Generally, the most at-risk web server will be those you have connected to the web; web server running on local host intranet networks are much safer although they can still fall victim to general accidents.

The interesting problem with web connected web server is how to use them for massive information sharing while at the same time keeping them safe from the sharks of the internet.(Read More How To Secure Website)

Let’s go over some tips on how to do just that right after we quickly review a few common threats to web server.

The Most likely Threats to Web Server

The most common threats that your web server will face include several different things.

• Denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks: Denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks are a very common threat. With these an attacker uses another system to consume your entire web server ‘s bandwidth or processing ability.Denials of service attacks are usually pretty minor but in the case of a distributed denial of service attack, thousands of systems can be quickly used to completely knock your web server offline.
• Profiling Threat : Other threats include profiling, in which case an attacker uses vulnerabilities like unnecessary protocols and open ports to gather inside information about your web server and the apps it runs for later attacks.
• Trojan horse and worms : Furthermore, there is the very common threat of viruses, Trojan horse and worms.

All of these will consume your web server ‘s resources, misuse them or damage them severely in some way, sometimes as part of a larger plan to attack yet another third party web server. These are just some of the most common threats to servers, many more exist.

How To Keep Web Server Secure On Web : Server Protection Tips

Intrusion Detection Systems

A good intrusion detection system that covers every conceivable entry hole into your web server will go a long way to protecting it. You can’t reliably monitor all possible access points, so it’s better to let a powerful intrusion application do that job for you.

Applications like Brute Force Protection will give you alerts for any attacks and sneak attempts that are occurring.

Actively Monitor Your Web Server

Don’t just depend on built-in security measures to take care of all your protection needs, instead engage in active monitoring of your web servers on a regular basis. If you can’t do this yourself, then hire someone reliable to take care of it for you.

Active monitoring should cover network, the web server itself, mail servers and operating system. Also keep a careful eye for odd patterns and execution on your system logs through the use of log monitoring software apps.

Use Authentication and Encryption Technology

Your web server should be protected by a strong password and different levels of access privileges for different levels of user trustworthiness. This means that, in addition to web server entry security, you should have internal barriers that are protected by strong password authentication and encryption protocols. You don’t want anyone who can access your web server at all suddenly being able to access everything it contains.

The important thing to keep in mind is that your authentication measures are strong! Passwords should be resistant to brute force attacks by having at least 8 characters of random numbers and a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters.

Keep In Progress Development on a Separate Web Server

If you’ve got programmers working on code and tweaking new applications, make sure they do it within a development environment on a separate and unimportant server. Unfinished or in-progress code can be much weaker than the finished product, so don’t allow it to contaminate the security of your essential server.

Patch your Web Server Apps and Systems Regularly

This is an obvious and straightforward step for good web server security, but it’s amazingly easy to forget thanks to laziness. All the internal apps like MySQL and scripts like PHP that operate on your web servers should regularly be updated and patched.

You can either set these updates to run automatically, or patch them manually yourself; either way, your security will consistently stay up-to-date and your servers will also work better when they use the latest software.

Audit Your Web Server and Application Logs Regularly

This might be a time consuming process, but frequently auditing the logs for your web server and all of its internal application processes is a great way to keep an eye out for suspicious activity and detect any possible intrusions that might have occurred and kept themselves secret.

If you detect something unusual on your web server logs, do not forget to follow up on it with more investigation or debugging.