Most companies have a website, all are different but they all have a common goal: that is to promote their businesses.
Most business owners value the benefits of the company website, but unfortunately they do not appreciate the risk they are putting their company under.

A recent report suggests that there were over one million web attacks against people and companies each day in 2015, every attack is a potential threat to a company.

Therefore it is safe to say that major security vulnerabilities in three quarters of popular websites put us all at risk, many business owners are under the impression that keeping to well-known, legitimate and trusted websites will keep them safe from cyber-attacks. Unfortunately this is not true.

Cyber criminals will exploit any area of a trusted website that is vulnerable, to attack users. The major factor in securing any website is to ensure all updates and patches have been performed and kept up to date. Website administrators need to ensure that they are on top of updating patches.

More than three quarters of all websites have unpatched vulnerabilities.

There is another interesting statistic; more that 15% of legitimate and trusted websites have critical vulnerabilities. This is frightening because these exposures allow cyber criminals to infect the site, gain access and manipulate these sites for criminal gain.

These attacks will then infect all users that interact with the infected site, and it becomes a chain of events that multiplies up many times. So from one site infection, it can cause havoc with many thousands.

The cyber criminals will try and manipulate the attack to get maximum exposure. This can take many forms depending on the cyber criminals motivation to infect the sites, but may include locking the system so that any user annoy have access to their data. The cyber criminals may demand that the website owners pay a ransom of some sort so the cyber criminal will then free the site for it to be accessed again. However, this may not be the end of their demands, and further ransom may become apparent at a later date.

The key to protecting companies from cyber threats include some of the following actions. Make sure the web administrator is aggressive in updating and applying any patches released by their internet protection provider. Instruct all users not to open email attachments from any untrusted or unfamiliar source. The business owner needs to ensure that they have a cloud backup strategy that protects them from any such cyber-attack, making sure the data can be restored quickly and efficiently to minimise downtime.

Cyber threats are a massive problem for all concerned, and must be tackled aggressively by the business owners.