Protect Your Website

in 5 minutes

How Cybersecurity Affects Your Page Speed?

Load time of your website affects your sales and not just because your Google rank can decrease. Visitors tend to leave early when they face high load times. Many things affect load time; image sizes, content lengths, and cybersecurity solutions you use. Always look to keep your page speed high. If you're unable to do this, your site is likely to suffer from poor user experience and slow loading times. Different things can affect your page speed, but things like a low connection speed between your clients and servers, the amount of data you're sending over the internet.

How does load time work

Image sizes, content lengths, and many things can affect your page speed through increasing HTTP requests. A high number of HTTP requests to your server slows down page loading times. High data transfer rates to your server is an issue. Your server will be flooded with too much traffic and that causes high data transfer rates and crashes. In order to mitigate data transfer rates and data traffic, you will want to employ various strategies that slow down HTTP requests. There are many methods like compressing your images, shortening your content and there are some less known ways to decrease HTTP requests. One such method is paging. According to Backlinko, paginating your site increases load time and it also takes more time to load because you are fetching small portions of content and skipping long sections. In addition to paging, there are a couple of hacks that reduce HTTP requests. Use application whitelisting which allows only your "trusted" applications to access certain parts of your website.

Why speed is so important

Even though website speeds are improving, they're still poor in many countries, especially in developing countries. This is true for countries with low bandwidth availability. Globally, the average website speed is around 3.2 seconds, which is half of what it used to be a few years ago. This is not good enough for consumers and especially e-commerce buyers. The biggest reason for this is that users are getting used to browsing websites that load in seconds. As an e-commerce platform, you have to ensure that your site is quick and attractive to consumers. Your sales performance is closely related to the overall experience your users have when using your site. They might choose to go to another e-commerce website, because of slow loading times.

How cybersecurity affects your website speed

This is something to consider when you're looking at any website. Most of the security solutions you purchase will protect you from cyber-attacks that slow down your website and they will help you to maintain a secure website. Cybersecurity is a must but choosing the right solution is also important.

Many cybersecurity solutions have high response times. Response time in cybersecurity means before deciding and sending the information to the server about a visitor is indeed a visitor or an attacker that needs to be blocked, some time passes, and that some time is response time. You can think of WAF and RASP solutions like a castle wall. Thicker the wall is better but also you should look out for castle wall’s door because if your door won’t open fast enough your customers won’t get in and you will lose them. Wallids opens that door to your customers in just 50 milliseconds without compromising security. That's the castle we talked about, thick walls and quick opening doors.

What can affect your website speed depends on these things. Constant website changes: This means that you're introducing new files and directories to your server. This will increase the chances that your server will be affected by a cyberattack, especially if you're using a shared server, which is likely to be the case if you're utilizing shared hosting. This can slow down your server and hamper the speed of your website. If you're using a VPS, then you should check the server size, bandwidth, and processor speeds. These are factors that impact your web performance.

It is common knowledge that if you use unsafe cybersecurity measures, it can slow down your website, thus affecting your users. Depending on the nature of the risk, you may need to implement various security measures.

Most organizations implement a two-factor authentication system or they have a third-party website security service like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Usually, when hackers find out about these things, they can find their way to your server's virtual address. Once they reach there, they can tamper with data on your server and, ultimately, your website.

Some security breaches make it difficult to update your website. In fact, some hackers will deliberately insert bugs in the software they use to hack you. They aim to slow down your site and make it difficult to update your pages because they want your business to suffer. All these hacks do affect your website, and you need to ensure your website is well protected against these threats.

Lacking security solutions, you could also risk your data. Without protection, anyone could steal your company's data. Every bit of data about your customers, competitors, and even the employees of your company could be at risk.

How to keep your website speed high

Here are some tips on how you can keep your website loading as quickly as possible: Make your site mobile-friendly Your website, if not mobile-friendly, won't be used by mobile users. Ensure your website has an optimized design that works on mobile devices. Your site will look great and speed will also be increased. You can pay a designer to help you with it. Remember image sizes. You can choose your images using different sizes; it is advisable to always choose high-quality and compressed images for your website. A website's loading time will be considerably reduced if you use compressed images for your designs. Measure the amount of data you're sending over the internet How much data is being sent over the internet determines how long your page takes to load.

Conclusion

It is important to protect your website and make use of helpful tricks to maintain a high-performing website. Making the right choices for security vendors, hosting services plays a crucial part. There is still a problem that you can face and it is this; your website will be slower during big and/or sudden traffic spikes. Make sure to increase your bandwidth limit before campaign times.

...

Unpatched Vulnerabilities Cost Millions, yet Nobody Wants to Update

Unpatched vulnerabilities are one of the biggest reasons for security breaches. Users rarely update the solutions they use and this makes it easy for hackers. Hackers are aware of old solutions' exploits and you can be aware of them too with a quick Google search. That is why it is important to keep updating to avoid data breaches.

Why updating is important

If you've been using the same services for a while, it's important to make sure you keep up with the latest software and security updates to prevent any security breaches. As we know, most people never make updates, and that is one of the main reasons hackers can breach a system. At the same time, many people think that they don't have to update software because it's not critical to their systems. Most software updates are urgent to fix vulnerabilities and they are usually released at the discretion of a company. Not everyone needs to update software, especially when they do not use the system for financial gain. But, if you own a business, it's important to ensure your company is not vulnerable to attack.

Exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities

It has been observed that some of the biggest breaches in recent times have been caused by unpatched vulnerabilities. That is not shocking cause 60% of breaches happen because of unpatched vulnerabilites. You can take a look at what a 'known' exploit is from https://www.cvedetails.com/. Use a cybersecurity solution that fits your needs to help protect your business from the risks of unpatched vulnerabilities and maintain a minimum standard of security. Don’t forget to update it! There are many different vendors that offer custom security solutions for your company. You should opt for the best product that suits your company's needs. Look for vendors that provide solutions most suited to your needs.

Why Nobody Updates

Updates have a bad name and they deserve it. They have bugs, they appear out of nowhere, they expect you to sit down while consuming your precious time. Those reasons create a very bad user experience and most people tend to avoid updates for a very long time. You can choose services like Wallids to make your update processes easier. For example, Wallids updates itself with each attack on the cloud making its algorithm stronger and while doing it doesn’t add new bugs or consume your time. This process is seamless but even if you don’t use services like Wallids, you should track updates to protect your business. Recent hacks like Microsoft Exchange hack, still hurts some companies because they didn’t update their services.

How to stay updated

There are some good ways of keeping yourself updated. Make sure you get patches directly from the manufacturer and not somewhere else. Check time to time to see if the updates are available for all the software that you use. Check with the companies for the latest update. These steps are really important to stay safe from cyber-attacks and let you know what's coming next in terms of attacks. How to keep malware off of your device Keeping your phone safe from malware is really important because once a hacker gets a hold of your information, they can get into other personal data that they can use against you and your customers. Hackers can steal your customers’ emails, photos and messages, and then they can use it for whatever they want. There are many instances where a competitor hacks its rivals to steal customers. It sounds horrible but other instances are usually even worse.

Conclusion

Keeping updated with security solutions can help you avoid cyber-attacks. Unpatched security solutions are also one of the leading reasons for security breaches. You should avoid choosing old solutions as many of them have vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to hack your accounts. You should avoid using unpatched security solutions in order to reduce cyber-attacks.

...

The Biggest Enemy of Conversion: False Positives

False positives in cybersecurity are a major issue for businesses that have security systems. It is important to understand this problem and address it. Companies need tools to identify false positives, improve their efficiency, and minimize the risk of loss. Continue to learn more about one of the biggest enemies of conversion: false positives.

What is the term False-Positive

False-positive is actually an umbrella term for false positives and false negatives. Even though these two situations are almost opposite of each other, both of them point in one direction; a bad call by the system. Let's shed a light on false positives.

Same question but different, I guess

A false positive happens when a piece of content has been flagged as suspicious and rejected because of it. Basically a false positive is a piece of data in your system that is incorrectly considered to be an attack. This can happen in a number of different ways, but the most common example is when a cybersecurity solution makes a mistake while analyzing. In this case, the customer will be flagged as suspicious and any request from the customer will be rejected. Because the system is not doing its job correctly, it's easy to falsely label someone as a malicious user or even a hacker.

In my previous work experiences, after a SQL Injection attack, my first thought was: "Proof there is an attack on our system". I did not have a good understanding of the true nature of the attack until I reviewed my networks. The result was a false positive in a security tool. While it's true that false positives are rare, there were numerous times I thought I was right about a potential attack and it turned out to be a false positive.

What is False Negative

Since we clear what false positives are now we can move to false negatives. False negatives are, as we pointed earlier almost the opposite of false positives. It means that a cybersecurity system instead of labeling a customer as an attacker, this time it labels a hacker as a visitor. Therefore it creates a security breach and clears the way for the attacker to get a hold of your data.

How does it affect companies

I can almost hear you say "Is that very common?" and "How does it affect me and how much it costs?". In a company, the false alarm rate can be up to 40%. That is shocking to hear but even more shocking to hear is that; companies lose an average of 2,79%, emphasis on average, of their revenue because of false positives. That number is actually more than chargeback costs. These events usually occur in campaign times so basically when a company spends thousands of dollars to get more customers.

Wallids solves the false-positive problem by disrupting the attack structure. It aims the cyber attacks and clears harmful code from the request and therefore even if Wallids makes a mistake it never blocks a company's customer. 

Conclusion

False positives hurt small businesses even more because they already have fewer customers than huge companies. They can not afford to lose some of them. In order to, decrease the damage that can be caused by false positives, you should choose the right tools or track requests and scan for false positives. But it can be late when you discover them so after you discover them try to solve the root problem that causes it. 

...