Jealous competitors or just plain bad guys – we call them hackers – will try to breach your website and leave behind damage in one way or another. Since hacking into a website is not easy these days from one static IP, hackers are a creative bunch. They have to means to hide their identities under various proxies.
Just like the plotline of many American movies – good and bad…
the Russians are the ones to blame.
Although I must admit that it does sound rather funny from one perspective, in practice it’s far from a laughing matter. Just looking at statistics I can say that the biggest and most extensive hacking attempt in recent years spanned four consecutive days. Most of it came from Russian proxies.
Here is a look at some of the examples of these hacking attempts. You should notice from looking closely at them that most of the proxies used originated from a number of different cities located within the Russian Federation.
Oh, and just one was based in Germany.
So, why are they coming from Russia?
Well, after doing a fair deal of research I have come to the conclusion that the Russian government and several hackers are – shall we say – friendly. You could call them partners in crime if you really wanted to.
What this boils down to is that at least from the perspective of the Russian authorities, hacking is not considered a major crime. Even if it happens to be spelled out as such in the constitution, the Russian government clearly turns a blind eye to these cybercriminals.
This means those hackers that are already in business and the new ones just coming on stream all have proxies to hide behind. If your computer system is not very well protected, you are at risk of getting hacked by a Russian or at the very least, someone hiding behind a Russian proxy.
This link will share with you tips on how to protect your WordPress website from hackers.
Let’s go back to proxies, and to be more specific, dynamic ip proxies.
These happen to be rather annoying because each time a hack attempt is blocked, the IP will get blocked. This causes any further attempt from that IP to be denied in the future. Dynamic IP proxies permit hackers to change their IP as often as they need to until they complete the hack attempt. This causes hackers to keep at it brute forcing your logins.
In simple terms, dynamic IP proxies give users (hackers) identity protection through multiple routes to your computer system. This is why I refer to them as being annoying (hackers and dynamic IP proxies). The single static IP could be blocked but dynamic IP proxies create several of them that you could attempt to block but in reality, you’ll never be able to keep up. Example of a proxy rotator would be over 83,000,000 IPs Rotated.
However, the multi-channel functionality of dynamic proxies can be stopped, or at least prevented from entering your system. But it is up to you to take the steps to protect your computers from hackers.
Remember, hackers are a sophisticated type of criminal. They continue to develop tools and methods to break into the computer systems of other people. Because they are so – and I want to use a different word here but I’ll call them – inventive and sneaky, you really have to keep your guard up at all times.
Be sure to always update your security programs when you get a notice to do so. This gives you at least one layer of protection. But you do have to do much more than that to ward of an attack of any kind from a hacker.
What steps can you take to protect your website?
- Use very long passcodes. I am talking about very, very long passcodes that can run up to 50 characters. Essentially, the longer the passcode, the better. Mix it up as well using upper and lower case letters, numbers and even punctuation marks.
- Protect your .htacess files.
- This is for WordPress users specifically. Be sure to use a good quality security plugin. I suggest going with Wordfence or something of that quality.
- For those of you not running WordPress, hire a skilled security developer who can properly protect your website for you.
There is no nice way to say it. A compromised website can be devastating. This is especially true if your site is used for the business of any kind. The downtime alone can translate to a great deal of lost revenue which can become even more costly the longer your site is inactive.
Stay protected by taking the precautions I have mentioned here.
Your website is quite honestly only as strong as the security measures you have taken. When in doubt, tweak your security and change your passcodes on a regular basis to add additional protection.