Four Steps For More Secure Small Business Websites

Cybercriminals increasingly are targeting the blogs and e-commerce sites of SMBs, but a handful of simple steps can make these sites harder to hack

Content management systems run by small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have come under increasing attack by botmasters looking to build high-bandwidth infrastructure for executing denial-of-service attacks or as drive-by download sites for malware campaigns.

In a recent case, dubbed “Fort Disco,” cybercriminals used a 25,000-node botnet of infected Windows systems to scan the Internet for vulnerable sites and then attempt to guess the administrative password using a small set of common passwords. The tactic may have worked in only a small percentage of cases, but it was still effective, claiming more than 6,000 sites.

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How a botnet works: 1. A botnet operator sends out viruses or worms, infecting ordinary users’ computers, whose payload is a malicious application — the bot. 2. The bot on the infected PC logs into a particular command and control (C&C) server (often an IRC server, but, in some cases a web server). 3. A spammer purchases access to the botnet from the operator. 4. The spammer sends instructions via the IRC server to the infected PCs, causing them to send out spam messages to mail servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)