Website Security in Trinidad & Tobago: Keeping Safe From Hackers

Why would hackers even bother with our tiny Trini sites when in the world website landscape richer fields beckon? Why do hackers hack in the first place? To hack or not to hack isn’t the question. While some personally hack, many instances are automated and the intent may be, according to Google:

The hacker may have intended to steal confidential or sensitive information from you or your site’s visitors, such as with phishing pages. Perhaps the hacker was trying to exploit a good website to drive traffic to, or improve rankings of, his/her less-reputable online business by adding spammy text or links to her site.– from Google

To accomplish this it requires exploiting vulnerabilities in your site to infiltrate and plant malicious code that affects it, you and your visitor, your computer; not to mention it creates the a splitting ache that affects your head. The purpose of this article is to remind you that though we’re the most southerly isle in the tropical Caribbean, our websites are very accessible and equal opportunity.

The last thing you want is a customer saying they tried to visit your site and got a message that ‘this site may be harmful to your computer’. While it’s impossible (and expensive) to install a Fort Knox level fortress (because we’ve seen even US Government sites getting hacked), there are still tools available to ensure that your website isn’t built out of straw.

CLIENT SITE SECURITY PRIORITY

One item on my client to-do list this year was to address website security for all sites in my charge as a result of my webhost Dreamhost’s new partnership with a service called Cloudflare. Being that I trust Dreamhost, having full confidence in their service and support, I didn’t look elsewhere except to be aware of the other options. So full disclosure, Cloudflare is my personal choice.

WHAT CLOUDFLARE DOES

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. It will automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. It also blocks threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.

Online threats range from nuisances like comment spam and excessive bot crawling to malicious attacks like SQL injection and denial of service (DOS) attacks (sorry if it sounds like Greek to you). CloudFlare provides security protection against all of these types of threats and more to keep your website safe.

The great thing about CloudFlare is that it’s core security protection is free and the paid advanced security plans may not be absolutely necessary for you at this point.

One reason why this is important for both of us is the fact that 95% of Forward Multimedia client sites use the WordPress platform which is a target because of it’s popularity and something that CloudFlare specifically addressed in an article on April 11, 2013.
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All FORWARD MULTIMEDIA client websites on my Shared Hosting Plan are already CloudFlare enabled. All new clients on my Shared Hosting Plan are automatically activated.
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How you can protect your website

All database driven sites, and there are many in Trinidad & Tobago using WordPress, Joomla and Drupal platforms, are always at risk and as Trinis say, what didn’t pass you didn’t miss you. Bottom line, there is no time like the present to fortify your own site. A hacked site is such a disruption and a headache you don’t need so explore your options and do something:

Check out CloudFlare and Incapsula the 2 top services
Educate yourself on website security
Choose at least the Free Plan and enable
Choose a paid plan for additional protection
Talk to your webmaster for guidance/assistance

Site security is part of good housekeeping practice along with regular website maintenance, optimization, including software updates of your content management system (CMS) and plug-ins to latest versions. Some level of protection is better than no protection at all and only when it happens to you do you realize how important it is. Don’t wait for that time.

April 14, 2013 / Articles, Featured Posts

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About the Author

admin

I am Zaf Rahaman, owner of Forward Multimedia Ltd, a Trinidad based digital agency now in our 13th year. Through my experience acquired on the ground since 2011, I’ve become known as one of the foremost authorities in E-Commerce, especially as it pertains to Trinidad & Tobago.

I began writing blog articles on various topics after observing the lack of online information about local E-Commerce. These articles quickly propelled the Forward Multimedia to the number one position on Google for all major industry keywords, a position consistently held since without challenge.

In 2018 I was an invited panelist in the annual Trinidad and Tobago Internet Governance Forum. Also in 2018 I was an invited speaker for the launch of the Virtual Caribbean DNS Entrepreneurship Center (VDECC) an initiative of ICANN- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international body that that coordinates the Domain Name System (DNS) worldwide.

I was also a stakeholder consultant for the Ministry of Trade & Industry’s National E-Commerce Policy which was passed in December 2018, with many of my recommendations making it to the final policy.

Most of all, I love to write AND love to write on everything website and E-Commerce related to help business owners in Trinidad & Tobago get the most out of their online presence.

ALL articles and pages on my site are written by me, in my voice, from the ground up, and for you, from a Trini perspective, using local examples and applications.