An Overview of Website Reinfection Vectors


The website security landscape is as complicated as it is treacherous. We often deal with clients who become reinfected over and over again. Once the attackers establish a foothold in an environment and recognize that a website is vulnerable, you can guarantee that they will be back to try to reinfect the website.

Our website firewall is designed to protect websites from attack and infection, but there are many different ways that attackers establish their presence into a compromised environment. A website firewall is but one aspect in a larger defense in-depth strategy to protect your website!

In this post I will review some of these other attack vectors and some ways that website owners can protect their sites from becoming reinfected.

First, let’s review how our web application firewall (WAF) works

Our firewall service acts as a reverse proxy. Essentially, it sits between the web server and acts as a sort of “gateway” for the traffic coming to your website. At its core it is a pretty straightforward concept: block bad traffic, allow good traffic. Attacks such as SQL injections, cross site scripting (XSS) and DDoS attacks will get blocked by our generic rules. Any known exploits against vulnerable website software such as plugins, themes and core files should also be blocked. However, our firewall is a very complicated product with a lot of different features! Let’s take a look at some of them:

 

Our firewall is designed to be platform agnostic. That is, it will work with any CMS platform. It doesn’t matter if your website is using WordPress, Magento, Joomla, OpenCart or any of the other CMS platforms available on the web; our firewall can be used to protect your website from attacks.

Different CMS platforms vary greatly from one another and work in very different ways. Since it is not specific to any platform, the basic firewall rules that apply across the board need to be generic enough to not interfere with the routine operations of normal website traffic. So, out-of-the-box it should be tailored to your website and the CMS it is based on to improve security!

Different CMS platforms have different admin panel URLs and the firewall needs to be configured to work…

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