Home » Industry » Small Business Sees A Rise In Cyber Threats

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

Should you be wary of SEO firms?

Good Call Commander! You should absolutely be suspicious of SEO firms these days. The industry is unfortunately saturated with unscrupulous, downright devious companies that prey on  unsuspecting business owners attempting to better their rankings. They pump your site full of fluff and post thousands of links around their

Gainesville Website Design: Mobile Websites

Mobile sites are a great way to tap into a new resource for many businesses. More and more people are using their phones as their primary device for Internet access. Phones are more computers than they are phones these days. A mobile website is a lightweight version of

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,

How Important Is Site Speed?

It is difficult to overstate the significance of a website’s page load time. Users expect websites to load quickly and efficiently in today’s fast-paced digital environment. A slow-loading website can result in frustration and a negative user experience, causing users to leave the site and possibly never return.

Website To Text

Introducing the Livewire Website to Text Application, a cutting-edge tool that transforms consumer engagement. Imagine having the ability to instantly connect with customers in a personalized way, bridging the gap between your website visitors and your company with ease. With this game-changing feature, you gain access to a plethora

WordPress: Capturing Post Author Meta

An easy one here from your local Gainesville Web Designer: How to retreive the author information from a post in the WordPress loop. This assumes you’re in the loop, of course. $meta_field= get_the_author_meta( ‘your_meta’ );   Badda-bing badda-boom. You’re done. It really is that simple. Just use get_the_author_meta,