Don’t Let Security Flags Surprise You!
As you are probably already painfully aware of, the Internet can be a dangerous place. There are a lot of scumbags who just love ruining people’s days for any numer of reasons – most of them directly related to money.
One of the favorite ways for these felons to take advantage of unsuspecting victims is through viruses delivered via websites – and guess what? Your business website could be one of them.
Scary thought, isn’t it? Well don’t despair.
There are ways of checking to see if you’re being flagged. The great news is that you can also check to see if your site has been compromised, for free, at the same time.
“Nobody Would Bother To Hack My Little Site! Right?”
Wrong. There are thousands, if not millions of people out there who would LOVE to hack your “little site”. In fact, odds are very good that your website has been probed by hackers nearly everyday it has been online. Being unaware of it does not mean it isn’t happening. Don’t become a victim.
False Positives & Over Zealous Security Firms Can Cost You
If I haven’t already frightened you enough to get you to do some checking into your website security status, let me tell you a bit about how the website scanning business works. Many anti-virus programs have ‘safe browsing’ features that actively block people from visiting bad/infected websites. At first blush this seems like a wonderful way of ensuring a computer doesn’t get infected, and it can help. The issue for website owners is that these companies have a motive for flagging websites. It makes their security product look like it’s actually doing something pro-active. This makes the end-user feel good, which sells more product. I’m not going to claim that any particular company is throwing false flags to sell more product, but be aware that it can happen.
“False Positives” are instances of a anti-virus program flagging something as containing a virus – which does not. This happens more often than many security firms care to acknowledge. False positives can cost your company dearly if it happens to you. (I’ll explain more about the reasons why this can be devestating below.)
“Over Zealousness” might be subjective, but it can cost your business a lot of money. For instance, some website reputation sites will flag ANY domain that is newly created. Imagine purchasing the perfect domain, spending all kinds of money on hosting, website creation, and marketing – only to find out that your site is being blocked by a major security progam! This happened to me on several newer domains. As you might imagine, I was not happy.
As mentioned earlier in this post, there are several ways to check your website and see if it is being flagged. I strongly urge you to take advantage of these tools. If you find your site is triggering a security warning, contact that company as soon as possible. Time is money so don’t put it off.
Please check out Six Tools For Checking Website Security for more information and a list of helpful tools.
