As a website owner it is the most disappointing and most annoying thing to discover that your website is down. This happens when you type in your domain name and instead of seeing your beautiful website design, you’re greeted with a blank screen. This is never a good experience, but it happens to many websites and it could happen to your website as well and of course using these hacking tricks mentioned this post.
The rapid growth in technology moves up as cyber criminals also grow. Cyber-attacks target websites and for which ever reason, you cannot rule out your website as an exception to such attacks. Many big websites have faced such attacks, some for minutes, an hour, or even more hours.
To Read: The Top 100 Hacked Email Passwords Ever!
So, lets dig deep in these four hacking tricks that hackers are using to take websites down!
1. Injection Attacks
Injection flaws, such as SQL, OS, and LDAP injection occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. SQL (Structured Query Language) is / are the most commonly used hacking tricks and can be used to potentially gain access to your database tables including user and password information. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization.
This is one of the most effective attacks that could bring down your website. According to Webdrive.com, the injection attacks are particularly common on enterprise and e-commerce sites where hackers expect large databases to be present. SQLI attacks are also among the easiest attacks to execute, requiring no more than a single PC and a small amount of database knowledge. Therefore, as a website owner, it is of importance to know that such an attack could bring down your website.
To Read: 5 Tips to Protect your Website from Malicious Attacks
2. Deliberate DDOS Attacks
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks usually bring down big servers that bring down all websites on the same servers. DDoS attacks are attempts to flood a site with external requests, making that site (and potentially others on the same server) unavailable for users. It is obvious that such an attack on your host servers will definitely bring down your website.
DDoS hacking tricks and attacks usually target specific ports, IP ranges, or entire networks, but can be targeted to any connected device or service. For example, the massive September 2016 DDoS attack on Dyn DNS service provider brought down websites that were on the same servers like, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Etsy, Github and many others. Such an attack on a big server, could bring down your website too.
Recommended: How DDoS Attack Affected the World’s Internet Giants
3. Cross-site Scripting (xss) Attacks
Attackers use Cross-site Scripting (XSS) to inject untrusted data and malicious scripts into what would otherwise be harmless websites. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Because these scripts appear to come from trusted websites, the end-users browser often executes the script, granting hackers access to information held in cookies or session tokens used with that site. XSS is usually used to gain access of a user’s account.
4. Brute Force Hacking Tricks
Here, attackers use very sophisticated applications and software to make attempts to “crack” every possible combination of username and password on a website. Brute Force attackers exploit weak passwords to get access to your site.
A brute force attack is easy to detect just because of the multiple log in attempts in your system. However, given enough time, a brute force attack will ultimately be successful if no great caution is taken. Here the caution is to make your passwords more secure that it would take too long to crack.
To Read: Email Security E-book: What You Should Know About Email Security 2017
Conclusion
As the world becomes more and more technologically strong, even cyber criminals using these tricks become more and more technologically strong. The more websites increase in number, the more cyber criminals become stronger. It is of no doubt, that the present date is full of massive data breaches and hacked user accounts.
Your website is no exception on the side of cyber criminals. It is very important to know that such hacking tricks and attacks exist and they could bring down your website. However, there are measures and cautions you can take to prevent your website from being easily brought down by such attacks (of course the avoidable ones).
