- Featured article
- People at Skills360 01 - May 2025 | 12 min read
In today’s digital world, cyberattacks are no longer restricted to big corporations only. In fact, 43% of cyberattacks target small businesses, and a whopping 30,000 websites are hacked daily. A single vulnerability in a site’s security system can result in the loss of data, including user credentials and bank information. That’s why, in this guide, we’ll dive deep into why website security matters and more importantly, how to protect your websites against such attacks.
Did you know that even a basic contact form stores personally identifiable information (PII) of site visitors? If your site handles passwords, emails, or payment data, you’re responsible for protecting it. Moreover, a hacked site often leads to downtime, either from malware or your host suspending you. For e-commerce, that’s direct loss of sales. Worse yet, you may have to pay a developer to clean up the damage which often costs thousands.
Similarly, Google blacklists compromised sites and flags them with “This site may be hacked” warnings in search results. This can make your organic traffic plummet overnight. This is why at Skills360’s full-stack development training, we teach our students to write secure, clean codes that help protect SEO integrity. We also train all our students to anticipate and prevent such breaches and threats before they result in lawsuits, fines, or reputation loss.
Regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and PCI-DSS have strict compliance rules, and an insecure site that handles sensitive data poorly can receive fines ranging from $10,000 to millions. Skills360 incorporates compliance standards into our website development course content, ensuring developers understand and apply them from the start. However for that you need a better understanding of the following common attack vectors:
Here’s what professional developers at Skills360 follow in order to bulletproof their sites.
SSL encrypts communication between the user and server. Google considers HTTPS a ranking factor, and browsers now label HTTP sites as “Not Secure.” At Skills360, our trainers emphasize this as a foundational step in all projects.
Most hacks exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated WordPress themes, plugins, or CMS Platforms. This is why we recommend developers to:
Pro Tip: Use a staging environment to test updates before applying them live, this reduces risk of crashes.
A WAF filters and blocks malicious traffic before it hits your website.
Top WAF tools include Cloudflare, Sucuri, Astra Security, ModSecurity (for Apache/NGINX) and more. These tools detect brute force, SQL injection, XSS, and even zero-day exploits.
We recommend using strong credentials and limiting login attempts. You can enforce complex passwords (minimum 12 characters,symbols, uppercase, lowercase), Add Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) using Google Authenticator or Authy or Implement CAPTCHA to block bots.
Advanced Move: you can restrict admin access to IP whitelisting or VPN-only access.
Backups are your last line of defense if an attack slips through. Always make sure you schedule daily automated backups for files and databases and store backups offsite like on Amazon S3, Dropbox, or a separate server. You must also regularly test your restore process as a backup is useless if it doesn’t work.
Use scanners to detect malware, injected scripts, and suspicious files.Tools like Sucuri SiteCheck, Wordfence, Quttera or Netsparker (enterprise-grade)can help catch what your eyes miss like base64 encoded malware hidden in a theme’s footer.
No single tool or plugin can guarantee 100% protection. Real security is layered and includes secure code practices, user education, and ongoing monitoring. At Skills360, we help developers build this mindset through hands-on training and real-world scenarios.
Stay proactive, not reactive. The cost of a breach is always higher than the effort it takes to prevent one.
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