With advancements in web technology, businesses need highly functional, visually appealing websites with improved security, emphasizing secure server-side programming language.
Programmers accomplish web programming by using programming languages to communicate instructions to a machine and execute actions.
Understanding the Process: Bringing Websites to Your Screen
When you load the website in your browser, from server to the browser a sequenced messaging had worked with a list of code to bring a page to your screen. Behind the screen, there has a server-side script on the web server that unites the database with front-end and the browser to bring a user requested page with a smooth user-friendly experience. There are many server-side scripting languages out to deliver the best possible results.
Even though we use the best server-side scripting language for web development, there are the utmost cases we get hacked. In general, most hacks occur opportunistically when an attacker identifies weaknesses in your site or server. Every day, attackers discover new weaknesses, leading to exploits and hacked sites. Opportunistic hackers use an array of tools to recognize the potential targets. It all starts with the list of exploits. For example, let’s say a weakness has been discovered in a popular slideshow plugin. The hacker will learn about this weakness and investigates the plugin. They will detect that there’s a recognizable “footprint” for the plugin – every site that uses it has the text “powered by My CoolSlideShowPlugin”.
From the above point, it was clear that it’s easy to scrape Google to build a huge list of hackable sites. So that’s what the attacker does.
Then they write a simple script to perform the hack, they load up their list of targets and set it to lose. The script will go onto the web and attempts to hack every site on the list.
Understanding Website Security Beyond WordPress
It’s not just WordPress site gets hacked. Whenever you visit a site, WordPress is the most used component. It’s not only software installed on your server. Server environments are difficult systems, with thousands of moving parts. Security exploits exist at all levels of the technology stack, from hardware up. WP White Security reported that weaknesses in the web host account for 41% of hacked WordPress sites. Some software component running on the server machine that had a security hole and a hacker exploited it.
As a footnote, only a tiny number of sites are hacked through the WordPress core files. This is just to show that how thorough the WordPress team is at closing security holes
Sever security is a vast subject – we could easily fill several books covering all the details. We have examined how attackers discover and utilize exploits to hack sites. Your major goal is to protect your site from such an attack. To do that, you must need a understanding of security that we must implement.
What are the key features of security?
- Know Your System
- The Principle of Least Privilege
- Defense in Depth
- Protection is the Key aspect but Detection is a Must
- Know Your Enemy
Know your System
Before securing your site, you need to understand how your system works. The deeper you understand, the more easily you spot to fix the weaknesses. It is necessary to understand which plugins are responsible for which features, what custom code has been added, and so on.
The Principle of Least Privilege
Each person who uses the system should have the least privileges they need to perform the tasks. The website designers need not have root access to the server. The writer should only be able to log on and write the content. You do understand who is interacting with your site and understand which privileges they require to perform their tasks.
Defense in Depth
Never depend on a single safety measure to keep the server safe. You need to have multiple security measures of defense. The more layers you deploy, the harder it is to break through and harm the site.
Protection is the key aspect but detection is a must
Do everything to protect your site. Get some ways to detect the attack in order to prevent it to happen in future.
Know Your Enemy
Know the methods used to attack the website. This will allow us to be more secure from hackers.
Instead of the above-mentioned tactics to know the hackers, we need to implement some technical methods to overcome attackers.
How to protect your website against attacks?
A business can adopt the below-mentioned policy to protect itself against web server attacks.
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SQL Injection –
In order to reduce the attacks you need to sanitize and validate the user parameters before getting submitted to the database for processing. Database engines as MS SQL server, MYSQL etc supports the parameters and prepared statements. They are much safer than any traditional SQL statement.
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Denial of service attacks –
Firewall is the best one that is used to drop traffic from suspicious IP address if the attack is a simple DoS. Proper configuration of networks and Intrusion Detection System helps to reduce the chances of a DoS attack been successful.
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Cross Site Scripting –
Validating and sanitizing headers, parameters passed via the URL, form parameters, and hidden values can reduce XSS attacks.
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Cookie/Session Poisoning –
Encrypting the contents of the cookies, timing out the cookies after some time, and coordinating the cookies with the client IP address used to create them can avoid this.
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Form Tempering –
We can prevent it by validating and verifying the user input before processing.
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Code Injection –
This can be prevented by considering all the parameters as data rather than executable code. Implementing sanitization and validation can achieve this.
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Defacement –
Best web application development security policy should ensure that it seals the commonly used vulnerabilities to access the web server.
By following this we can get rid of hackers and keep our website safe and secure.
In this geek story, we’ll list
The 5 most popular and the best server-side scripting languages for web development
Here we go –
PHP
Poorly developed PHP coding by developers who fail to accurately mistrust user input causes the majority of vulnerabilities. In simple words, the developers need not involve the code to sufficiently or correctly sanitize various form of user input.
The two key major key factors that make your Php site secure is at the input to Validate and Sanitize and at output to Sanitize and Escape. Which means you are performing checks at the input and output points.
Considering, PHP serves as the most popular open-source server-side HTML-embedded scripting language utilized for creating dynamic web pages in web development. In general, PHP was designed for web development to pull and edit information in the database, making it mostly used for small or medium-level website development compared to other languages. Even though demand for Python is increasing, PHP is still very popular for Secure Server-Side Programming.
Java
The major reason that the Java become such a very popular target for attacks.The huge Eco-system of add-on software components in Java. In fact, Java is the second most easy language to hack by the mid-level hacker as Java was designed at the maximum compatibility, It is an object-oriented, that it runs on the host of device, class-based and concurrent language that will work on any platform that developed by the sun micro system. But still, if have an expert on your side as Java is a little complex to hack. Businesses consider java because it’s very helpful for the enterprise-level business applications, high-traffic sites, and Android apps as it have a unique functionalities that no other programming language do provide.
Python
It is the fastest growing language and widely accepted in the web market. It’s simplicity and readability makes it great for beginners.it can backs up many programming paradigms such as OPPS’s, structured programming and even functional programming. A lot of web developers are using the python. so as to get the results of its flexibility and the board range of application.
As with any coding language, security is the major thing to consider at front-end for all the python developers especially for those with giant database of sensitive information that could lead to terrible consequences if hacked or breached.
In order to protect the code from hackers python uses Checkmarx’s CxSAST, a static code analysis solution, that stands out to test solutions as not the solution which actually protect the python code and compliance issues, but also as tool to the organization’s advancement.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET offers an impressive set of cryptography-related classes for protecting even the most sensitive data. Throughout ASP.NET, implementing cryptography is simple, making it ideal for Secure Server-Side Programming.
Microsoft developed ASP.NET, an open-source web framework, for building modern web applications and services. With ASP.NET, you can quickly create websites based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and add complex capabilities like Web APIs, form over data, or real-time communications. The common language runtime (CLR) allows programmers to write ASP.NET code using any supported .NET language. An active developer community ensures that the language has well-written documentation, ensuring its comprehensiveness for Secure Server-Side Programming
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C#
C# is one of the most popular and multi-paradigm programming languages of Microsoft’s which has run on .NET framework. As we know C# is the flagship language chosen for the Secure server-side programming. As you know, it’s hard to find a language with as much depth from an enterprise standpoint as C#. The original replace of Java, JVM is the whole platform with C#
It coordinates productivity and versatility by blending the best aspects of the C and C++ languages. It includes imperative, functional, generic, object-oriented and component-oriented programming principles.
Don’t get panic about your site from the above it was clear that, if there was a hacker for your site, there will be a security guard for the same. Still you are scare to have a web site for your business? Krify is here to assist you with a strong and secure website.
Want to get the best website with highly secured server-side programming language? we are here to help to come up with your dream website into real. Get in touch with us.
