How Can You Stop Hacking Using Data?

Beverly McNally
3 min readJun 26, 2020

Is yours the next website to be hacked?

Don’t think that it cannot be yours, as it has nothing worth to be stolen. Everybody knows that data are on the top of the hacker’s list. So, you cannot grossly underestimate it. Keep into account that 43% of all cyber-attacks were plotted against small enterprises. Out of all these, 60 percent of these businesses have been derailed.

Even, hackers put millions of dollars in their malicious attempt to see how it goes in terms of benefits. A web publishing came up with a prophecy about whopping investment worth $6 trillion by 2021 in cybercrimes. These are some horrifying figures, which are irresistible if you do not really want to go out of the digital business.

So! Can you predict a cyber-breach?

May or may not.

Web Scraping to Access Data

It won’t be completely wrong if I would say that web scraping of your traffic report can get you out of this prospective cyber trouble. You can religiously put yourself out there in extracting such patterns that point at a cybercrime. How it happens, let’s get started to know it below.

Extracting your web traffic report can help you to take stock of where your traffic originates from. However, you might be putting some exquisite marketing efforts out there on geo-location specific traffic pulling practices. The visitors are likely to explode from those particular geographies, which is certain.

Now, move to its dark side. Get out more from that online traffic report, seeing if it reports a sudden inflation in it from unknown locations. It can be an alarm. A report by CSIS underlines a few countries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea that are being enlisted in the most suspicious online epicenters of online spying. So, take it as a serious concern.

Login Page Visitors

Some scammers are dexterous enough to create codes or find scripts that can ensure access to the intended website. Out of many, the SQL Injection Attack is the most common one. With it, they can crawl into the content management system or the login form, making it vulnerable to damage or tampering. If it is the worst one, they can interfere with the login form, making it unavailable. As per IBM and Ponemon’ Institution’s study, the average cost to undo the attack is whopping $157 per user, which is hard to bear for those who don’t have a big pocket.

Likewise, Authorization Bypass is very popular tweak to break into the poorly designated applications or content management frameworks that have a weak login page. It ensures setting up of the user’s identity, which brings leverages along with. Consequently, the system starts to believe that scammer’s is an authentic entry, which allows an uninterrupted access to internal pages.

Data mining Is a Cure

If you give data mining a try, you can easily see how the patterns in a series go. For instance, a sharp downsizing of the traffic indicates that the crime has been committed. Fear, Google penalty and crashed webpages can prominently bounce out visitors.

Upon analyzing the condition, you can deny access to your website by uploading .htaccess file. In case of the SQL code injection or authorization bypass, deter the attack by:

· Rename your admin login page, which should not look in the same manner as admin.php, which looks quite obvious.

· Whitelist your IP addresses, which restrains admin panels to only authorize IPs. Make this route valid for only your team.

· Thoroughly review core files rather than being restricted to functions.php, index.php and 404.php. If there seems any unusual date or change, overwrite that file with unaffected duplicates.

Without getting an extract of the forceful vulnerability, determining the defect would not be possible. Certainly, web extraction can get you closer to mining the patterns that have probability of scam. So, always rely on discovering such attempts that generally underlie web content.

--

--