It’s not fun to go through your server and close every opening that a malicious web user can take advantage of. Nevertheless, it is completely necessary to keep your web site running and free of harm. To get started, you should be open your control panel and forage around your options menu.
Any time you give someone access to your dedicated server, you are allowing one more way into your secure information. Even if the person is trusted, things such as social engineering can pry passwords away from someone quite surprisingly. Essentially you want to limit anyone who has access to not only your server, but to any serve your server offers to others.
A server straight out of the box will be near useless to you. If you want to provide your back end and the front end functionality, you will have to install modules. Modules are small scripts and programs that allow you to do things such as use a language or program to run your server. Update are frequent, and should be downloaded to avoid certain security risks.
Although you won’t ever run into a security concern coding in straight HTML, as soon as you turn to another language, the odds are you will face security concerns. In the right hands, every language can do something drastic and harmful if it has access to the back end of the server. An example would be with Ruby on Rails, which works closely with MySQL, which can easily be manipulated to delete an entire database in seconds.
Go through every module that your server runs. If you don’t use it, or don’t think you will use it in the future, it’s best to remove it. Always check your research to see whether or not the module you are viewing is necessary for your server to operate. Doing this will ensure that a user won’t make use of a security exploit in a module you aren’t monitoring, and thus don’t have a patch for due to the lack of attention paid to the module.
Server administrators always make backups from time to time. And this just isn’t because of bad users that want to ruin your server for fun- it’s because sometimes there are bugs in code, accidents, and other odd happenings that can’t be explained. If solutions don’t seem to work out, having a back up is always something that can be done as a last resort- and they are easy to do as well.
In Conclusion
Security awareness will keep your boat afloat in the stormy weathers of the Internet. Remember that these tips and more should be kept in mind, and perhaps buying a book on the procedure wouldn’t be a bad idea. A good web host should also give you proper tips to follow in securing your server for you.
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