Different types of website attacks and prevention ways

Every website owners have a headache about their website security. Criminals can attack a website in many ways. The range and depth of attack vary.

Now the question is how can we protect our website from being hacked? The answer is before protecting against the attacks we should learn about those attacks, it will help to find out leaks.

What are different types of website attacks and how to prevent them?

1. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Cross-site scripting targets directly the users of a website to get their personal information. In this situation, the hackers don't try to disclose the stored data on the database. 

The  XSS attack is the most common cyber attack making up approximately 40% of all attacks. The malicious hacker inserts a piece of code into a website, then the code is executed by the website’s victim visitors. 

Specifically, the hacker injects a payload with a malicious JavaScript file into a website’s database. When the victim visitor requests a page from the website, the victim's browser shows a page with the attacker’s payload. As a result, the attacker is able to make remote access and control the victim’s device. 

Prevention way: 

By setting up a web application firewall (WAF) you can protect your website against Cross-Site Scripting attacks.

2. Injection attacks

The injection attack methods target the server’s database directly. Commonly hackers perform this attack by using input fields within the websites. As a result, they may be able to manipulate the victim's web application by altering the commands. SQL Injection is the most common type of injection attack.

Prevention way:

Ensure filtering in your input fields so you can sanitize unwanted inputs on your database. 

3. Fuzzing attack

Fuzz testing is widely used by developers to find out code errors and bugs. But hackers use the same procedure to find out websites leaks. First of all, a large amount of random data is inserted into an application to get it to crash. And then a specific software is used to find out weak spots.

Prevention way:

It is wise to test your website's weakness before hackers check it. Fix everything under the supervision of experienced developers. 

4. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)

The DDoS attack mainly targets a website to make it down by doing frequent consecutive requests to the server. As a result, the site goes unavailable to other visitors.

This type of attack makes a website temporarily or permanently down, where some remote machines make artificially frequent visits to the victim's website. It consumes a huge amount of bandwidth, the website will permanently be down if the hosted server has any bandwidth limitation. 

Prevention way:

Web hosting providers provide services to protect against DDoS attacks, you can contact your hosting provider. Instead, you can dynamically block unwanted IP addresses from visiting your website which makes a frequent visit to your website. 

5. Phishing attack

A phishing attack is a misleading attack where cybercriminals motivate victims to pass their personal information. In this situation, victims provide sensitive information to hackers by unknown.

Hackers usually perform this attack by sending links to victims. Sometimes it requires filling up some information and sometimes it is ok to just click the links to be hacked. 

Prevention way:

It is unwise to click every link even from unknown sources. You can check suspicious links on different link explorers that may explore vulgarity. Awareness is the key to preventing such attacks.

6. Bots generated attack 

Bots are just tools that work independently following the previous setup instructions. Bots are created to make human tasks easy, but some offenders use them for bad purposes. Bots are able to launch DDoS attacks, bulk mailing attacks, or hunt personal information.

Prevention way:

You can prevent unwanted suspicious bots from crawling your page by simply blocking their IPs. Bots are not human, so you can also mislead them by making misleading applications within your webpage. 

7. Malware attack 

Malware attacks are also referred to as ransomware, worms, trojans, adware, or spyware. In this process, hackers install malicious software into your website, that acts as an open backdoor. Cybercriminals use this door to access your system and hijack data from your server. 

Prevention way: 

The best way to protect your website from malware is to use a firewall. A firewall prevents malicious attacks by blocking all unauthorized access. You should use highly secured antivirus software on your device, which also provides online security.

8. Brute force attack

A brute force attack is one of the simplest forms of website attack, it is also known as a password attack, The hacker simply tries different combinations of usernames and passwords randomly and repeatedly until it logs into the user’s account. It is hard to do manually, so hackers use different software to perform this attack.

Prevention way:

Use a strong password combined with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Don't use a default username or a username that matches your email address, try a bit different. 

9. TCP SYN flood attack

An attacker exploits the use of the buffer space during a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) session. The attacker’s device connection requests to the victim's web server, but it does not respond when the target system replies to those requests.

As a result, the target system goes to time out while waiting for the response from the attacker’s device. When the connection queue fills up, the system crash or becomes unusable.

Prevention way:

By increasing the size of the connection queue you can handle basic attacks. I recommend decreasing the timeout on open connections. If you use a strong firewall and make configured to stop inbound SYN packets, it will give you a better solution.

10. Zero-Day Attack

In these attacks, the cybercriminals get the patch information by relating a new version of the software. Sometimes the attackers can get information about an upcoming security update, and they can learn where the loopholes are. Then they target users who are having this vulnerability or haven’t yet updated their systems. 

But why this is called a Zero-day attack? Here the day of software updated on the system is considered day one. And hackers perform hacks before day one, which means day zero. 

Prevention way:

Keep your system regularly updated, and do update as soon as possible. A web application firewall (WAF) blocks all kinds of abnormal traffic, so you should use it.

Final Thoughts

It is not so easy task to make a website fully secured, even giant websites are faced with attacks. There are different types of attacking systems already available and hackers are generating new ways. So what to do now? Don't take it too seriously because your website is not going to be hacked immediately and obviously. 

But it is good to keep safe before any occurrence occurs. Do your best as much as possible, and try to learn ethical hacking to get hacker holes.