Do ‘Trust Seals’ really guard Trust?

When a visitor first reaches your website, it needs to convey the trust needed for him to even consider the other factors about your product or service. Does your website convey this trust effectively? Online shoppers have different needs as compared to people shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. Both worlds cannot be compared from sales and marketing perspective.

In a typical brick-and-mortar store, buyers can see, touch, and even try the physical products. They can see the legitimacy of a store with the owners or employees standing right in front of them. When they make a payment, they receive the correct change and a receipt immediately. All these factors make shopping in brick-and-mortar stores smooth, easy, and worry-free for shoppers. It is very important that your website is able to convey this trust in the virtual world.

A Trust Seal on your website is a good start. Small and medium businesses face tremendous challenges while establishing a brand to start with. The biggest one being how a visitor believes that you are an established player in the market and are not a fraudulent entity. A visitor also needs to be sure that your website is secure and the customer’s private information and credit card data is handled safely.

McAfee Secure, Hacker Safe, Scan Alert, Trust guard and Hackers locked are few providers who are offering such website security seals or trust seals. However when you compare these services one of the key factor is how many of these services are offered by a specialist security company and at what price. On these questions Hackers Locked definitely scores over others.

When you buy a trust logo from Hackers Locked and display it on your website, you customers can follow the same by clicking on the daily updated trust seal. Immediately your security status is showcased by displaying a website security certificate. This shows that your website has gone a website security check on a daily basis and passed the test.

This is the time when a new visitor can be sure that he is ready to buy and share his or her credit card information with your website. Indeed at this stage you can be assured that a trust seal from Hackers Locked when displayed on your website is the true trust guard you can possibly have.

Website Security Check Simplified

Hackers exploit security vulnerabilities in popular web software such as blogs, forums, CMS, image galleries and wikis to insert hidden illicit content into web pages of innocent third-party web sites. Thousands of website owners are unaware that their sites are hacked and infected with viruses and malicious codes.

Even worse situation would be to find the home page of your website replaced by a hacked web page. This would cause a major dent in customer confidence and visitors would not be able to trust your virtual presence any more.

This is also why a website security scan or a website security check is a must to ensure that your website is trust worthy and has taken sufficient measures to protect its integrity.

Website Security, Website Security Check, Website Security Testing, Web Application Security, website penetration test are all variants of initiatives that walk the same path of ensuring that a website is tested for any major vulnerabilities that exist in its technical design and can therefore be exploited by an hacker.

Here are few simple steps that you can take to ensure that you walk the right path for your websites security:

1. Perform a website security check: Google your way to a trusted website security testing firm or vendor. Look at their website and see if they look like a specialist firm who focus on security related topics or are like another all in one web shop offering website design, development and SEO services. If this is the case skip this vendor and move on. Short list a few website security testing vendors and call / email them. Ask them for their delivery model, track record or sample reports. If possible talk to one of their clients or look for a testimonial section that says something about the quality of their penetration testing skills.

2.  Enroll for a Malware scanning service: Look for a service that scans your website for malware and virus on a daily basis and warns you before you get blacklisted on the web. If you have undergone a website security check then it is very unlikely that your website is infected with a virus as most virus infections take advantage of existing and known vulnerabilities. In case you performed a worthy website security checks and plugged the gaps you can be assured of a safety net. However it’s worth the effort to enroll your website for such a service. Make sure the service provider also has the capability to help you clean the infected website, just in case it happens.

3. Perform daily vulnerability scanning on your website: Vulnerability Scanning can act as a very strong proactive control against possible hacks that can be executed on your website at a given time. Look for a vendor who can scan your website using multiple commercial scanners. Open source scanners like open vas and nikito can also be used , However they cannot be as effective when compared to Nessus , SAINT , Found stone etc as these companies put in a lot of effort and research to keep the plug-in updated. As a result you know it first if your website is impacted by an evolving threat.

4. Buy a Website Security Certificate: If you are putting in effort and money to secure your customers trust, why not tell your customers about it. This is where a website security certificate can help you. In fact most ecommerce websites use multiple trust seals to showcase that their website is safe for shopping. The best part of having a website security certificate on your website is that they mostly come with a daily vulnerability scanning service with it. This way the certificate is updated with the daily security status of your secured website. This helps in customers gaining confidence on the website and also enhances sales and conversion rate.

If you are looking forward to have your website undergo a website security check, Website security testing or website vulnerability scanning then Hackers Locked could provide you with a high quality and low priced service. We even offer you free Website Security Certificate with such services. Call us or talk to an online security expert at Hackers Locked.

Simple approach to website security

A Web Portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the search engine standard, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, infotainment, and other features. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Websites have almost taken the role of your business card and more. No matter what business you have, you need a website developed as much as you would need a shop or an office. After all who would want to miss on a world market looking for your products or services via the web?

However having a website also poses a security threat similar to any modern day business would have with physical presence. We guard the physical premises with cameras, security guards and modern equipment. Similarly your web presence also needs to be guarded via daily security scanning, website security testing, website penetration testing, website malware scanning and website firewalls.

Of course the million dollar question then is where do you start?

Well the answer is equally simple. The best way to protect your web presence is undergo website security testing. It is a common practice to have any website or software tested for bugs before it is promoted to a production environment. The concept of security testing although not equally popular is similar in nature. The skills required however are completely different, rare and specialized. Only a few specialized security testing vendors focus on hiring the real ethical hackers to provide you sufficient assurance that your website is secure.

The six basic security concepts that need to be covered by security testing are: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, availability, authorization and non-repudiation. Security testing as a term has a number of different meanings and can be completed in a number of different ways. This will ensure that you have covered all aspects of the website that are key elements in any websites security.

After you have undergone a security test from a reputed security testing vendor, you would know exactly what aspects of website security you would need to focus on first.

The next step would be to make the necessary steps that as stipulated by the security tester in the final report. Most penetration testing vendors lack in this area and ignore its important. This is a key element for any security test and should be of utmost importance while you choose your website security vendor. If you are presented with test results that are not described well enough and do not point to SMART recommendations to solve them, you must simply reject the report. Look for clear guidance on how these security gaps could be solved or higher a professional who could solve them for you.

Once you have tested your website for security and fixed them, you must continue to stay vigilant against emerging threats. This is possible via a website security scanning service that you can sign up from a prime security service provider like Hackers Locked. McAfee secure or hacker safe is another such premium scanning service, the differentiating factor when compared to a service like Hackers Locked is the three hundred percent heavy price tag.

Some of the threats you can check and mitigate by doing the above are:

SQL/PHP/JavaScript Injection Vulnerabilities
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Broken Authentication and Session Management
Insecure Direct Object References
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
Security configuration loopholes
Insecure Cryptographic Storage
Failure to Restrict URL Access
Insufficient Transport Layer Protection
Invalidated Redirects and privilege escalation

Once you have undergone a website security check, do not forget to endorse your security status to your visitors by displaying a website security seal or a trust seal. Trust Guard and Hackers Locked Website Security Trustmark are good examples. A website security certificate can help you on compliance requirements and also increase visitor confidence.

If you are a small or medium business looking for a quick yet in-depth review of your website security posture, Hackers Locked is the service provider you would love to work with. 

Is your website secure from hackers?

How secure is your website?

You may not have thought about it so far but as your web presence is becoming a key element in the interfacing you have with your customers, you need to turn around the question.

How secure is your customer?

A customer who is ready to dig inside his pocket to pull his credit card out and share the information related to his hard earned money, while getting ready to buy something online but stops to confirm how sincerely is this web shop taking website security and thorough website testing to prove it to be a genuinely secured website. What he has to believe on is what the customer can look at; he might look for a website security certificate, a website trust logo, a showcased seal of trust or something on the similar lines.

Do customers care about a website security or a trust seal?

Google analytic time and again has proved that lot of potential customer turnouts are from the first couple of pages he visits, due to the insecurity build up with a thought that this is not a secured website. Above all that there are a lot of options while shopping on the web, which are enough to confuse the potential customer, who most of the times end up buying something, which he was not sure of.

In today’s ever widening vertical of online shopping, Website Security Testing has become an important part of every web shop owner’s and customer’s day-to-day life but there are quite a few online business owners who are still not sure of how on-demand Vulnerability Scanning and Website Trust logo is going to help the business owner to transform the visitors into potential buyers or customers as well.

Is Website security testing really complex?

Web application testing and security testing was much simpler a thing in the past, but today with all the latest web application technologies cropping up in the market, it has become a mandatory challenge faced everyday in securing the websites from any external unwanted and unethical activities. Securing your website has become as important as advertising or marketing the products and services which the business or an individual is trying to sell in the market.

 There are complaints that the web vulnerability scanners are too invasive and that is why online business owners choose not to execute them against their websites, but as the security experts say living with the invasion for the ethical reasons is far better than the thousands of websites being invaded everyday for all the unethical reasons. Reports from an automated website security scan are a good way to know a clear overview of your website security level. Manual penetration testing done by a qualified certified ethical hacker is the next best step if the website vulnerability scan report has a lot of genuine findings, in order to secure the website from unethical hackers trying to break in and breach the financial online data security of your valued customers.

What is the solution?

Solutions are also available to address these challenges. Trust-Guard or McAfee Secure or Hacker Safe can give you what it requires to make your website safe and endorse it with a website security certificate. However the price tag attached to such services makes it difficult if not impossible to justify the ROI. This is where Hackers Locked proves to be the trusted security partner for small and medium businesses. Commercial scanners, state of the art reporting portal, email alerts for critical gaps found in your website, we have it all and the price tag is almost 300 % less of what you have to pay to our customers. This is why it was an easy choice for ‘Making Cosmetics INC’ one of many customers who moved from Hacker Safe to Hackers Locked. If you have a website just ask us for a scan report to know the real benefit of staying secured!