Choose a Secure Web Hosting Service:

The foundation of your online presence is your web hosting provider. Opting for a secure hosting service like AIT ensures you benefit from robust security measures. With AIT’s data center, your website is shielded from external threats, ensuring web hosting and domain privacy are not compromised.

Keep Software and Plugins Updated:

Outdated software and plugins are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Regularly updating your CMS, plugins, and themes is crucial to maintaining website security. This proactive approach helps in safeguarding your site and domain names from potential threats.

Implement an SSL Certificate:

SSL certificates play a pivotal role in encrypting data between your website and its visitors, enhancing domain privacy and security. Google rewards SSL-secured websites with higher search engine rankings, making it an essential element for your website domain.

Strong Password Policies:

Implementing strong password policies for your website’s backend is crucial. Encourage your users to use complex, unique passwords for their domain name registrations, and consider two-factor authentication for added security.

Regular Backups:

Regular backups of your website, both on-site and off-site, are essential. AIT offers backup solutions to help you quickly recover your data in the event of an issue, safeguarding your domain registrations and web hosting.

Monitor for Suspicious Activity:

Use security monitoring tools to detect and respond to unusual activities on your website. AIT’s services can assist in identifying potential threats to your domain names and taking corrective actions.

Protect Your Domain Name:

Your domain name is your online identity, making its protection crucial. Here are some steps to secure it:

1. Enable Domain Locking: Prevent unauthorized transfers or changes to your domain name settings.
2. Use a Trusted Domain Registrar: Choose a reputable domain registrar like AIT for your domain name registration. AIT, as an ICANN accredited registrar, provides expert support to help you navigate these challenges.
3. Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Add an extra security layer to your domain registration process.
4. Regularly Review and Renew Your Domain: Keep track of your domain registration and renewals. Use AIT’s domain name search tool to check domain availability and manage your domain names effectively.

Securing your website and protecting your domain name are vital for maintaining a robust online presence. By following these best practices and partnering with AIT, you can effectively manage your domain names and web hosting, ensuring the long-term success of your business online. Whether it’s choosing the right domain name, navigating the domain registration process, or securing multiple domain names, AIT’s expert support and comprehensive services are just the beginning of establishing a strong and secure online identity. Remember, your online business presence is just the beginning of your journey towards online success, and AIT is here to support you every step of the way.

Expanding on Domain Name Registration:

When it comes to securing the perfect domain name for your online identity, AIT makes the domain registration process seamless and hassle-free. With just a few clicks, you can search for your desired domain name using our domain name search tool. AIT offers a wide range of domain extensions, including popular top-level domains (TLDs) like .com, .net, and .org.

What sets AIT apart is our commitment to providing expert support throughout the domain registration process. We understand that your domain name is a crucial part of your online business identity, and our team is here to assist you in finding the right domain name that suits your business name and objectives.

Furthermore, AIT offers free domain registration with select hosting plans, making it even more cost-effective to secure your online presence. We believe that a great domain name should be accessible to all businesses, and we offer competitive pricing and great value for your investment.

Once you’ve registered your domain name with AIT, we offer automatic renewals to ensure that your domain remains in your possession without interruption. We understand the importance of maintaining your online identity, and automatic renewal is one less thing for you to worry about.

In conclusion, AIT’s domain registration services are just the beginning of your journey toward establishing a strong online identity. With our extensive domain name options, expert support, and commitment to security, you can trust AIT to be your partner in building and safeguarding your online presence. Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a larger enterprise, we have the solutions to meet your domain registration needs. Your domain name is your online address, and AIT is here to help you make it work best for your business.

What is a DDOS Attack

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on your online resources can cost you from $52,000 to

$444,000, according to a Kaspersky Lab report. What’s more frightening than what a DDOS attack can cost you–the low entry barrier to launch one. A business competitor, angry customer, or even disgruntled employee can easily acquire the necessary skills to take your online business completely offline.

In a typical DDOS attack, a group of computers (ranging in number from few hundreds to hundreds of thousands) is used to overpower an online service by dumping as many data requests as possible. Exploits used to initiate an attack could be found throughout all levels of the internet’s architecture. An HTTP exploit for example can disguise itself as a legitimate HTTP POST Header (Commonly used in uploading forms) to slow your website and potentially shut it down. A buffer overflow, many hackers’ favorite, can exploit web applications and server-side programs to jeopardize memory safety. Every day, security experts and hackers alike continue to find new ways through which the wrong entity could cause damage.

The Cost of DDOS Attacks

If your site is hit by a DDOS attack, you may incur bandwidth overcharges and will potentially lose business every second your website is down. More importantly, according to the Kaspersky Lab study, 29% of DDOS incidents negatively affected a company’s credit rating. Your business’s reputation and insurance premiums are also likely to suffer.

DDOS Prevention and Mitigation Solutions

Here at AIT.com, we take your security seriously. DDOS prevention and mitigation solutions are one of our top priorities. Our Security Scan solutions offer all you need to make sure your online business never falls victim to these attacks. We provide weekly and detailed reports by our talented in-house team of engineers about your server’s security level. Not only will we remove any pre-existing exploits, but we guarantee zero exploit reoccurrence for 30 days and will keep you updated on the latest patches and upgrades necessary to maintain top security. Also, our Free Private Registration can help you keep your name off a WHOIS lookup–insuring that potential attackers personally targeting you will not be able to identify your websites!

Do not put your finances and business reputation on the line. Sign up for a Security Scan today!

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)

The DMCA was enacted in 1998 to bring intellectual property rights into the digital age. The DMCA established the means necessary to protect against copyright violations.

Why you should care:

• You can file a DMCA report if you suspect that your intellectual property or copyrighted work has been misappropriated.
• Unfortunately, the DMCA is abused a lot, and some companies have been known to file DMCA’s when other sites provide less than favorable reviews of their products.
• The DMCA has a Safe Harbor provision, which indemnifies you for copyright infringement committed by your end users, but you must diligently respond and/or comply with DMCA take-down requests.

Communication Decency Act of 1996 (CDA)

The CDA serves to protect free speech and innovation on the internet. Under Section 230, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This law is the subject of ongoing debates, and Section 230 has been legally challenged and amended several times, thanks to Internet activists and the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why you should care:

• CDA Section 230 allows you to keep that unflattering picture of your friend up on Facebook (and doesn’t allow your friend to sue you for it!)—it is what essentially why the Internet is a bastion of free speech.
• Not only are users not liable for their content (provided that the content is legal), you, as a website owner, are also not liable for what end users post on your site.

Foreign Surveillance Amendment Act (FISA)

FISA began eliciting great controversy since its enactment in 2008. This provision allows the US government to issue warrantless electronic taps for the purpose of acquiring foreign intelligence information.

Why you should care:

• It’s hard to guarantee that your or your end users’ data is kept private.
• Cloud computing and cloud hosting allows for the import and export of foreign data on US soil. As a result, despite the fact that foreign data can be guaranteed privacy in whatever country it originates from, that data becomes vulnerable once it enters the US.
• There’s a rising trend in companies discouraged from conducting business with American businesses due to the fact that their data can be compromised.

Within the next two years, US government agencies will be required to implement HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) on all publicly accessible websites. Although this commitment to internet security standards comes much later than one would expect — especially since private sector companies like Amazon, Ebay and Facebook have already adopted default-HTTPS–it will be a welcomed and reassuring change.

When the Firefox extension “Firesheep” came out in 2010, authentication and cookie vulnerabilities were gravely exposed. This extension allowed users to easily sniff for unencrypted cookies over unprotected networks and take control of log-in credentials shared between users and websites, which emphasized the ease with which users’ private log-in information could be compromised by practically anyone who downloaded the extension. Thankfully, a critical security threat of this size galvanized industry leaders to adopt a more uniform approach to end-to-end HTTPS encryption, as opposed to just using it for site authentication. HTTPS ensures that not only log-ins are protected, but it also encrypts all subsequent communications between the client and the server, protecting users from man-in-the-middle attacks and packet sniffing vulnerabilities that the Firesheep extension glaringly exposed.

In light of the recent and embarrassing hacks of US government websites, potentially affecting the data of 21 million people, this commitment to HTTPS is reassuring. Initiated by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, the HTTPS-Only Standard will give the millions of federal employees and other users the secure connection required to protect their data. The same initiative recognized that implementing and maintaining HTTPS-Only standard will come at a significant financial cost, but this cost will be offset by the critical vulnerabilities that will be cured by such an implementation.

The HTTPS-Only standard policy has been made available on GitHub for users’ comments. AIT offers several security options for its customers for their web hosting plans.

Login into server through SSH using a Terminal or Putty. Run the following commands to download and install maldet in server.

wget http://www.rfxn.com/downloads/maldetect-current.tar.gz

tar -xvf maldetect-current.tar.gz

cd maldetect-1.4.2

./install.sh

You can make email alerts to receive maldet report to your email. For that you need to make changes in maldet configuration file.
Open maldet configuration file and do changes as below:vim /usr/local/maldetect/conf.maldet

email_alert=1 (change value from 0 to 1)

email_subj=maldet alert from server

email_addr=alerts@yourdomain-name.com (menstion mail id for which you need to receive maldet report)

email_ignore_clean=0 (kept as 0)

quar_hits=1 (change value from 0 to 1)

Scanning for Malware using Maldet

To scan whole server, use this command.

maldet -a /

To scan just a specific directory, use this command.

maldet -a /home/yoursubfoldername

If Maldet finds infected files on the server, they will display in the output of the above commands. The next step is to clean those files using the following commands. Note that this is an example, and your output may change slightly. The entry for DATE-TIME will be the date and time of the scan report.

maldet(15153): {scan} scan report saved, to view run: maldet –report DATE-TIME

Type below command to list all scanned report in server.

maldet –report list

You’ll then see a scan result with the ID of each scan. To clean up the infected suspicious files on the server, youc an run the following command. You need to run the clean command passing the scanid as a parameter, which is shown here as DATE-TIME.

maldet -q DATE-TIME

What is SSL?

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is the most commonly used security protocol; it creates a secure channel between two communicating machines on the Internet or an internal network. SSL is generally used when a browser must connect securely to a web server.

SSL protocol requires little interaction from the end user. In the case of browsers, for example, users are notified of the presence of SSL security by a padlock image and the protocol “HTTPS” in the URL (go ahead, click on it!), or, in the case of SSL Extended Validation (EV SSL), a green address bar.

By dynamically encrypting data between the user and the server, SSL ensures that any potential interference during the traffic process would be rendered useless since only servers are capable of decrypting the secure data.

What is an SSL Certificate and Why Should You Get One?

Digital SSL Certificates are issued by Certificate Authorities (CA) after validating your application. Once validated, your website will start to display the signature SSL padlock and encrypt all data between client and server.

The most prominent reason for acquiring an SSL certificate is security. Data like personal and credit card information will become secured against any potential intrusions. Additionally, your customers will be protected from phishing attacks by other sites (or web pages) claiming to represent you for malicious purposes.

Besides ensuring security, SSL certificates are also essential to gaining customer trust, which is particularly crucial for e-commerce sites. A Gartner study reports that “70 percent of online shoppers have terminated an online order because they did not trust the transaction.” SSL certificates are precisely what an e-commerce site needs to project trust and security. The same report continues: “64 % (of the users previously discussed) indicated that the presence of a trust mark would have likely prevented the termination.”

For over two decades, security and trust have been core values to AIT, and our SSL Certificate Solutions are a reflection of that commitment. AIT partners with GlobalSign to bring you various SSL Certificate Solutions with up to 256 bits encryption. Let us help you project trust and give us a call to see which certificate is most fitting for your website.

What is PCI Compliance?

PCI, or PCI DSS, stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. PCI DSS, launched in 2006, established a standard of requirements for any business that electronically processes, stores or transmits credit card information. According to a Statistica E-Commerce forecast, in the USA “retail e-commerce sales amounted to 225.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2012 and are projected to grow to 434.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2017”. This exciting commercial growth, unfortunately, hasn’t come without setbacks; online fraud and credit card data theft have skyrocketed, presenting the industry with new challenges.

Should You be PCI Compliant?

Although PCI compliance might not be mandated under US federal laws yet, some states do require businesses handling credit card data to maintain certain levels of compliance. Violations can lead to hefty fines (ranging from $5000 to $100,000) on your business. In fact, the rising trend of legislating different aspects of PCI compliance means that even though the legal federal framework has yet to be implemented, the best choice is to make your business PCI compliant now.

Although these standards might seem to be just another bureaucratic impediment to conducting business, full compliance–regardless of whether it’s legally required or not–is a beneficial long-term strategy for the following reasons:

• Cost-effectiveness:

Maintaining PCI compliance can cost from $60 to over $500 a year. However, this cost can be offset against any potential fines resulting from violations or lawsuits initiated by compromised customers. For compliant businesses, there is a rising legal trend of holding PCI assessors liable for security breaches as seen in Target’s massive credit card theft case.

• Customer Confidence:

Online users are getting savvier. Just like how a secured HTTPS connection and SSL certificates can inspire trust in a website, PCI compliance reassures your customers that your business is committed to the latest security standards to protect their financial data. Maintaining compliance ensures that any potential breaches will not necessarily reflect on you as they would on the PCI assessor.

• Business Confidence:

If you are non-compliant, a security breach can significantly increase insurance premiums and your bank can even terminate your relationship for being a significant legal liability or, at the very least, hike up transaction fees.

Contrary to popular belief, small businesses are also regular targets of financial data hacks. In addition, third-party card processors do not necessarily exempt you from legal liability in the case of security breaches. PCI compliance is a sound financial decision for a small business.

How Can You Become PCI compliant?

PCI compliance is broken down into 4 levels, depending on the number of yearly transactions your online business handles:

• Merchant Level 1

Over 6 million Visa transactions per year. Visa can also determine, at its discretion, who can qualify for the Merchant 1 level.

• Merchant Level 2

From 1m to 6 million transactions per year.

• Merchant Level 3

From 20,000 to 1 million yearly transactions.

• Merchant Level 4

Less than 20,000 yearly transactions.

Consult with a PCI assessor, your bank and/or your hosting provider to see whether you can qualify for PCI self-assessment or if you need to provide further documentation. Procedures differ depending on a number of variables such as yearly transactions, security history and bank or assessor requirements.

At AIT, we help our customers navigate the process necessary to establish payment gateways and merchant accounts. Give us a chat to see if we can help your online business project the confidence it deserves.