Cyberattacks on the Rise! How to Stop Hackers

[00:02] we're talking cyber security partly because as many of you know you might have seen my recent video where I shared some of the ways that we could have some of the ways that we could have avoided getting hit by a Cyber

[00:19] great but data breaches as well as denial of service kind of issues are all costly to businesses and that's why website security is so important I was reading an article the other day and this is part of what prompted this video

[00:33] this article claims that according to the identity theft Resource Center 73% of small and medium businesses that includes you if you have a website and are trying to make money even if you're just a blogger or if you're a small

[00:46] business whatever you are 73% have experienced some sort of Cyber attack or data breach or both in the last 12 months that's higher than ever before when I saw that claim I thought that can't be right I mean we just had a

[01:02] little Cyber attack but I guess it was a real Cyber attack and it did impact hundreds of thousands of websites so I decided to do a little bit more research to see if I could validate that claim I found this cool article from strong DM

[01:16] on statistics for 2024 for cyber security apparently 46% of all cyber fewer than a thousand employees small and midsize businesses smbs 61% of smbs

[01:28] I mean it's a little lower than our 73% number that we're trying to hit we're number that we're trying to hit we're the target of a Cyber attack in oh 2021 shoot that was 3 years ago and it says malware is the most common type of Cyber

[01:40] attack aimed at small businesses 18% of all cyber attacks and look at this 87% of small businesses have customer data that could be compromised in an attack you might not think you're storing any real important data but you probably

[01:54] have more than you think especially if you've ever sold something this is part of the reason for the GD PR legislation over in the EU essentially giving consumers the ability to control their data the problem is that even with those

[02:07] kinds of laws in place in Europe in California and other places throughout the world today it's pretty much impossible for me to keep track of where all of my data is and who has it in fact

[02:21] it's kind of unsettling to me how many people suddenly have me on an email list you before somebody sold them my information but that's totally cybercity article from crowd strike it talks about why are small businesses at risk well

[02:36] businesses we think we're just not that big of a Target I mean it even asked the question don't cyber criminals have bigger fish to fry as a result of that we don't take very good security measures the other issue is that really

[02:49] good Enterprise level security is expensive and that's why big companies will invest a lot in it they got the money to do it and it makes it harder to attack them and some sometimes these attackers are able to Target a lot of

[03:03] people all at once a lot of businesses all at once and so they can get a lot of value out of a single attack so we're actually a bigger Target than we probably think we are according to Insurance business mag um it says that

[03:18] the biggest primary point of vulnerability for I I would imagine it's mostly data breaches is fishing with that is the point of entry making up 53% of these attacks and not to scare you even further but according to sb.gov and

[03:33] this is a report that is actually like I think like 10 years old okay but it said think like 10 years old okay but it said at the time that 50% of smbs have been the victims of cyber attacks and over 60% of those attacked go out of business

[03:47] I don't know if that 60% number really is accurate today just because these cyber attacks are so prolific and I think we have better resources for recovery but the problem is is that when you have especially a data breach it's

[04:00] one thing to have your site go down for like a day it's another thing when your customer's data has been taken that leads people to not trust you even if reasonable precautions and it maybe wasn't your fault case in point in my

[04:15] recent video I talked about how I've used last pass to track my password so that I can create very very complex passwords and I have literally hundreds I was told by I don't know probably no less than 20 people not to use last p

[04:30] and not to promote them because why they've had the data breach before some people went so far as to say they had a ton of hacks and a ton of data breaches I don't know about a ton and I'm not here to defend last pass I've talked to

[04:42] other people inside project 24 even that have way more expertise in cyber better options and we can talk about those in another time as well in general using a password repository also puts you at risk because if they get hacked

[04:55] a lot of them are doing is using encryption so that even they can't see your passwords without your specific encryption key so the only way anybody's going to get them is if they're able to log in through your credentials so

[05:11] protect those credentials at all cost all right again back to the cyber security stuff how are you going to protect your website well we've talked in the past about some of the most common options out there for the

[05:24] websites that we recommend we teach you to use WordPress some people are like WordPress is awful honestly any website is at risk of attack it doesn't matter what content management system you're using whether it's WordPress or any

[05:37] lot of the malware security is being done at the application Level if you just use a WordPress plug-in like word fence which is done a good job for a lot of people it's it's a perfectly good plugin but when you use a plugin it's

[05:51] so it's happening at the same level as the malware that can get installed onto your website can deactivate the other security at a higher level then it can actually manage all of those

[06:07] applications as they're updated so this is where I kind of get to the point of this video shortly after I put out that last video I was contacted by someone over at cloudways cloudways is who I use for my hosting and they decided that it

[06:21] information with you and so they are sponsoring this video I've personally been using cloudways on all of the websites that I own for a couple coup of years now basically ever since I started working with them because I've been so

[06:33] happy with them as a hosting provider between the cost especially because I manage so many websites I mean if you have more than like two websites it's on most of the other shared hosting

[06:47] terms of features and capability from cloudways at that cost goes above and beyond what I ever got on any of the shared hosting platforms for WordPress project 24 that's why I recommend it

[07:00] that's cool cloudways keeps adding new features in part by partnering with all sorts of other companies that have these awesome features and then integrating it in to their hosting and they just recently launched malware protection if

[07:14] ID had this enabled on my website before that attack happened I probably wouldn't have heard about it after the fact so now I'm kind of kicking myself that I I'm glad I know about it and that I can make you aware of it now hwis is already

[07:30] protecting us from so many other possible attacks one really common attack is a DDOS attack it's a distributed denial of service essentially what they do is they send a whole bunch of traffic from different

[07:43] places bot traffic to your website all at once to utilize all the resources and it prevents your site from being able to actually serve legitimate traffic well I've already had in place bot protection this is literally just built in this is

[07:57] for a website for nonprofit organ organization that I do work for and I numbers or anything because it's just doing this automatically they're blocking certain traffic that matches certain patterns that makes it look like

[08:10] bot traffic or automated traffic and that can prevent those types of DDOS attacks do I think that they're going to try to like take down this symphony's website probably not but then again small and midsize businesses are being

[08:24] specifically targeted these days with cloudways I also have daily backups for free just included I they have this uh capability for safe updates I talked about safe updates in my other video using another program to

[08:36] do them but here it's also built right in this is another paid feature for $3 a month you can do those safe updates so essentially when you do these updates to your plugins and stuff it can take a snapshot right before that way if you

[08:49] have the kind of attack like I had and I think this is one of the most common attacks for WordPress websites is when you get a plugin on your website that case it was a very irreputable plugin we've told you one one of the ways to

[09:03] avoid malware is simply to not use plugins that don't have very much credibility this was a plug-in for a very reputable organization and guess what the plug-in itself got infected why because somebody was able to get the

[09:17] credentials of a developer who works on that plug-in because of another data breach somewhere else so they got a hold of their credentials logged in created a malicious update and pushed it out to everybody using that plugin and that is

[09:30] what included my website and it put a whole bunch of spammy crap links and it's kind of a denial of service sort of issue the resources on the website just started getting overloaded and that can be costly to your business you don't

[09:43] want that sort of stuff to happen well with safe updates again if I had just done safe updates instead of enabling auto updates on my WordPress site that I could have just backed up to before the update could literally just like

[09:59] the update could literally just like press edit undo on that update and all gone cloudways also has a whole bunch of other features again already built in they have a dedicated a server level firewall they're regularly putting out

[10:12] security patches and updates to make sure that we have the best uh most stuff and essentially trying to make sure that their servers and our websites are not susceptible to the types of attacks that tend to happen the most

[10:27] they also make available two Factor authentication they can make it so that just logging in you require two-factor authentication so the whole credentials getting stolen becomes less of an issue you can also use that Bob protection but

[10:40] addresses that need to be able to connect to your website it's easy you whitelisting certain IP addresses already on the free version they have a sorts of cool stuff they have role-based

[10:53] can have a developer actually go into the back end of my website even on cloud ways and work on the database and stuff but without having access to everything real-time monitoring tools as well as log management and Analysis so

[11:08] that are potentially happening and all the potential risks that you're facing website but now they've leveled It Up by adding in malware protection and this is actually I think super cool again for a

[11:23] has been to use something like word FRS or suuri these are expensive Solutions yes there's a free version of Word fence features that you get with a paid version but the cheapest paid version of

[11:38] Word fence costs more than double what cloudways is charging for their malware about their malware protection what it is and let's talk about is it even as good to check out malware protection for your own website if you're already on

[11:53] cloudways for your hosting you just come on over here to your application get the left side you click on Mal protection and you just turn it on it's really quite easy but let's look at what they're saying they do first of all

[12:06] fishing protection they can't stop people in your organization from opening dumb emails and clicking on the links but what they can do is identify when that link has malware that's being loaded onto your site they can identify

[12:18] opportunity to run anything here it talks about that proactive defense they can block malware injection in runtime you see if you install a new plugin on your website or you update a plugin on your website like I did that you think

[12:30] is likely to be totally just fine but it's got malware in it because this malware protection is not at the same application Level it's actually able to read that code and detect that malware before it has a chance to actually be

[12:45] loaded and to run on your website and it can prevent it from ever doing anything in my case that malware ran and so what it did is it actually injected some code it did is it actually injected some code into the theme file for my website and

[13:00] it was able to go create some users on my website giving them access to the back end again fortunately they didn't have an opportunity to do it since they attacked like 100,000 websites at the same time and I identified this pretty

[13:12] any of that from even happening because it would have identified the risk and blocked that malware from loading at all now if you do end up with malware it's going to be able to clean it up and then here this is kind of vague but robust

[13:27] that's pretty awesome they do have this blog post here that I do recommend I'll description that talks about cyber security the risks that we face today they link out to some other articles and they talk about security plugins they

[13:42] talk a little bit more about some of what they do you can see the cost comparison four bucks a month or less if you have multiple websites like I do that price can even go down plus cloudways is now working on a

[13:55] comprehensive WF as well as domain reputation these are going to be added at no additional cost I mean essentially the security of your website is one of they're heavily investing in and that's a great reason for me to not ever leave

[14:11] a great reason for me to not ever leave so this video was sponsored by cloudways but everything I said in it is 100% what I believe I've used a lot of different hosting options for WordPress there are options that are less

[14:23] expensive at the very beginning if you have a brand new website but just recognize that even when your website's small even if your business is fairly new or small you are potentially at risk of a Cyber attack and something like

[14:37] that could be what shuts you down so if you're on cloudways I recommend you at least go look at malware protection and see if it's something that you should enable on your website it probably is but you can make that decision for

[14:49] yet I encourage you to go check it out right now if you use the link in the description and make sure that you use coupon code is summer3 it's going to get you 30% off for your first four months on cloudways it's a special promotion

[15:02] they're running right now you're not going to get a better price anytime soon going to get a better price anytime soon but also cloudways has free migration so you can migrate your existing website over to cloudways for free and uh that's

[15:16] pretty awesome too so I invite you to look into it because I want your business to succeed I don't want you to fail especially not because some other jerk somewhere else on the planet decided to take what you built thanks

[15:28] for joining me today we'll see you in the next video