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

Moving Your Website To A New Host

Sometimes it’s easy, most of the time it is not. What a headache! If you’ve moved hosts and domains several times you’re probably an old hand at it; if not, you’re in trouble. You’ll probably need the assistance of someone that has some experience in this area. Choosing

JSON and PHP

Here at Livewire, Gainesville Web Design headquarters, we have had a couple of projects recently that allowed us to work with JSON and PHP. Initially it may seem a bit strange for PHP experts to want to embed javascript functionality in their code base but the two work

Review: Total Cache WordPress Plugin ★★★★

An easy plugin for WordPress that does all your caching for you automatically. What is caching? A cache essentially takes a screenshot of your page and keeps it in local memory. When that page is called (by a user visiting it) then it is called up from the

Using Warning Lights or Guages

A good article on fox-business about whether your business uses warning lights or gauges to understand how your business is growing. The proper answer should be: gauges. A light is just either on or off, a gauge gives you much more information about where your business is headed,

Facebook Dings Developers

In the ever growing app community, Facebook is putting the screws to developers looking to use their vast resources to build their apps. Really, they’re just looking for a little “reciprocity”. But come on, how much do you need? You already own and operate the largest website in

Matt Birk has a new website

This is responsive website with layout originally conceived by HTML5. Clean and simple, it is just what the doctor, er, lawyer ordered. Matt needed something up quick, but didn’t have to sacrifice quality. WIthin 2 days we had a simple design up that he can be proud of.