Did you ask yourself what is WAF? WordPress, Joomla and the likes coupled with cheap hosting has enabled non-technical / normal / muggles to create fancy looking websites quickly and cheaply. The need for a custom website built from the ground up has diminished…and it seems everybody and his dog now has a website. Unfortunately most novice website owners are not taking website security seriously – or even know that it is needed! In the rush to get their pet-grooming or nail bar ‘on-line’, they haven’t given a second thought to hackers or the havoc they can wreak!

DATA BREACHES AND WEBSITE SECURITY

Just as you would install virus and malware protection for a PC, a web server also needs protecting. Web servers at the end of the day are just a computer serving webpages and are fallible by the same issues a PC or mac has. Unauthorized access, distributing of malware, viruses and of course ransomware. They can even be used as a drone in a bot-net to bring down other sites. Whilst a hacker putting some cute anime image on the home page with a message is one thing, ransomware and data breaches are a lot more sinister and can destroy a business and it’s reputation.

In the age of Big Data, data is now worth BIG money. Massive Data breaches (where a hacker gets onto the website and downloads data, such as customer information) are becoming every day events. Some high profile data breaches such as the Ashley Madison resulted in the exposing of customer data that had used their site (to have an affair!) as the ransom wasn’t paid. Awkward.

The U.K. and other countries are now fining website owners/companies for these breaches with some of the fines are big numbers, e.g. £400,000 (TalkTalk). Visa and MasterCard have also in the past few years introduced some very high fines for any business that has had a payment related data breach. Website owners are now accountable for the data they hold. It’s not going away. If you hold any data relating to your users – you are at risk. It’s scary how easy it is for hackers to extract data from unprotected websites. Often the owners won’t realise until customers start calling enquiring why their data is on the internet. If the fine doesn’t destroy a business, the damage to your reputation most likely will.

WHAT IS A WAF ANYWAY? WILL IT PROTECT MY WEBSITE FROM HACKERS AND DATA BREACHES?

A WAF or Web Application Firewall is a something that sits between the webserver and the users of the website. It’s a firewall, a barrier filtering out the bad requests and only letting the genuine traffic pass. Protecting a website with a WAF is actually really easy. It’s easier than protecting a PC – with the setup being done by the SharkGate team normally in a matter of minutes. Placing a website behind a firewall or WAF such as SharkGate not only blocks hackers and prevents data breaches – but also makes the website faster by some clever caching.

Our SharkGate product is a ‘pro-active’ firewall, we don’t just block hacking attempts. We also monitor and alert our technical team to unusual activity. If anything suspicious is found, our cybersecurity specialists immediately jump in to investigate. Our unique approach has prevented thousands of hackers attacking our customer websites and prevented numerous data-breaches. We deal with the bad stuff, whilst you, the site owner can get on with making your fortunes online.

A WAF or Web Application Firewall is a something that sits between the webserver and the users of the website. It’s a firewall, a barrier filtering out the bad requests and only letting the genuine traffic pass. Protecting a website with a WAF is actually really easy. It’s easier than protecting a PC – with the setup being done by the SharkGate team normally in a matter of minutes. Placing a website behind a firewall or WAF such as SharkGate not only blocks hackers and prevents data breaches – but also makes the website faster by some clever caching.

Our SharkGate product is a ‘pro-active’ firewall, we don’t just block hacking attempts. We also monitor and alert our technical team to unusual activity. If anything suspicious is found, our cybersecurity specialists immediately jump in to investigate. Our unique approach has prevented thousands of hackers attacking our customer websites and prevented numerous data-breaches. We deal with the bad stuff, whilst you, the site owner can get on with making your fortunes online.

We Can Help Save Your Business

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WordPress website defaced ? If we don’t fix a defaced website in less than 1 hour then we do it for FREE!. Luckily for us we are very good at fixing sites fast!