Is your business website powered by Drupal open source content management system? If yes, then as an entrepreneur your primary focus must be on how to make it secure. All sorts of the online businesses i.e. small, medium and large get affected by hacking or malicious attacks. Stealing personal (private) data, turning your website into off-line, or taking your system's control from you, hackers can easily affect your business at any point of time. So, the primary target of the entrepreneurs should be to enhance security level of their Drupal website and making it extremely secure from outside attacks of the hackers.
But, the major question is how to bring improvement in security of your Drupal website. Through this post, we have recommended 10 security tips that act as an optimized solution of this hacking issue. So, follow all these tips and experience a powerful and secure business over the web.
Let's Start These Top 10 Tips:
1. Use Up To Date Software Or Versions
First important tip that increases security of your Drupal website and protects it from getting hacked, is the use of up to date software or versions. Every new version is launched with some advanced security features, therefore installation of outdated or older software must be avoided at any cost for the benefits of your website. So, always upgrade to the newest version of Drupal and make the website free from hacking.
2. Secure the Permissions Of Directory (Folders) and File
Any web application developed using CMS like Drupal needs 777 permissions for executing the tasks in all the cases. Assigning full access permission is not considered wrong on a temporary basis. But, if you keep full permission on all files and folders for a long time, then they are easily accessible and writable by everyone. In this case, it becomes extremely easy for the hackers to hack or affect your web page. So, what is the recommended permission to sort out this issue.
777 indicates read (4), write (2) and execute (1) for owner, group and public permissions. Recommended permissions for directory (folder) and file are: 755 and 644 respectively. Assigning this permission will make your website safe and secure.
3. FTP Passwords Must Be Strong
Most of the webmasters around the globe use simple and easily guessable passwords for FTP login. This is considered among one of the worst mistakes and increases the possibility of hacking. To solve this issue, FTP passwords must be strong enough with a mix of alphabets (lower & uppercase), numbers, symbols and special characters, so that the hackers cannot guess them easily.
4. Website Must Be CAPTCHA-Enabled
CAPTCHA is an automatically generated letters and numbers enabled on the website to detect whether you a human user or software entering the website. It also plays an important role to raise the security level.
5. Access To Sensitive Data Must Be Blocked
The next important tip that helps to make your Drupal website secure is that access to sensitive files or data such as authorize.php, cron.php, install.php, etc. must be blocked via .htaccess.
6. Consistently Backup the Website
Another crucial tip that can largely reduce the possibility of being hacked is to keep the backup of your Drupal website consistently. Take the backup either daily, weekly or at monthly basis for improving the security.
7. Server Side Validation
Validation must be done not only on the browser, but also on the server side to tighten the security. This validation checks the form when the users enter text in the field made for numbers only. It prevents the hackers from entering the wrong data and undesirable results.
8. Web Pages Must Be Secured With SSL Certificate
Having an SSL certificate provides an additional security to your website. It encrypts all the login details of the users along with the information available over the Internet, so that the hackers cannot read any information.
9. IP Restrictions Must Be Applied on Areas Like Private and Admin
IP restriction is a highly effective and results-driven method that ensures no unauthorized personnel will enter or access private as well as admin areas of your Drupal website. To set IP restrictions on a particular location of your website, .htaccess rule is used for this purpose.
10. Default Database Prefix Must Be Changed
For obtaining top-notch security and freedom from the malicious attacks, it is recommended to change the default database prefix for your website. Add a prefix, which is hard to guess and protects the password from getting hacked. It is must to always use unique and strong passwords for your database users.
Hope, you have understood all these tips based on protecting Drupal website from hackers and other malicious attacks with ease. Follow all of them if you are presently using the website powered by Drupal content management system for improving its security and making it free from hacking.