Skip to main content Screen Reader Website Version
Get a Quote
Home Web Design SEO Services ADA Compliance Hosting & Support Custom Web Applications Our Work About Blog Contact

Small Business Sees A Rise In Cyber Threats

Come on, let’s all live in the real world: we’re all vulnerable. Really the only chance you have these days is to make it as difficult as possible for any potential hacker to get to your valuable data. First and foremost this means protecting your data in transit. Using secured connections to transmit data is crucial to any protection strategy. In web terms that means having an SSL certificate installed. There are some variations but most provide 128 or 256 bit encryption which has been relatively reliable, although security loopholes were recently discovered.

Fixed? Yes, but can we be sure. The heartbleed bug went undetected for some time. What else could be lurking out there that we haven’t discovered yet?

Secondly, protect sensitive data at rest. This means encrypting your database. We like to use AES256 encryption. It isn’t foolproof, but it is strong and recommended by everyone’s favorite secret organization, the NSA.

Third, protect your passwords. This means letting your staff know how important keeping this data safe. Don’t leave passwords out in the open and, for the love of everything holy, make them strong. “123456” is not a password (we feel we should not have to mention at this point, but still will, that “password” is not clever… and never was). Keep your passwords safe – sometimes it’s best to create a little song to remember it. Or if you have many passwords, create an algorithm to remember them by. For instance, use the name of the domain you’re accessing to configure a password. If you were logging into Livewiregeeks.com, you might use the L and S as the first two letters of your password, then add some variation, take the numerical representation of that letter and att that to the password. So for a domain called ABC.com, if might be AC321 (the numbers being C=3, B=2, A=1 , added together =5). As long as you remember the process of creating the password, you don’t have to remember anything else. Just looking at the domain will enable to to know the password.

Tedious? yes. Works? yes.

Some more information on the current cyber security situation.

More Web Design Blog Content

5 Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Its Website

5 Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Its Website Your website may have been exactly what you needed five or ten years ago. But businesses evolve. Services expand. Customer expectations change. Search engines update their algorithms. Eventually, even a well-built website reaches the point where it starts working against

Offline linking

This is a profound point. A lot of linking takes place offline. Sounds weird but many great links sprout from the personal relationships you make as a business. Noteworthy links can be found at your local chamber of commerce just like any Hotfrog or elocal directory site. “This

Good one on Sitelinks

Sitelinks also factor into your ad rank, and can influence the position of your ad on search page. Ad Rank previously took into account your max cost-per-click (CPC) and quality score, and now ad extensions and formats are another component of the calculation. Seems like a no-brainer to implement,

Gainesville Web Marketing

North West Mini Storage and Warehouse is a new client of ours. We started optimizing their site about 3 weeks from the date of this post. Already a page 1 contender, our client now enjoys a surge in search engine traffic – all organic, all of it white

Conversion Optimization

So many people have a myopic outlook on SEO and SEM. They tend to focus on optimization as strawberry field, where you can just pick a little fruit from here or there and fill up your basket. Not so fast. It’s not just about having a full basket,

New Projects

We’re excited to have new projects coming in on a regular basis. On the menu for the next few weeks are some great opportunities to expand our portfolio and our reach. Lake Butler is electing a new Sheriff soon and we’ll be creating one of the candidate’s websites.