How Malware Can Impact Your Business Website

In today’s hyper-connected world where most of the business happens online, your company’s website is perhaps its most valuable asset. In addition to being the online face of your company, your website generates sales, processes transactions and promotes your business. Protecting this valuable resource from cyber threats such as malware is crucial if you want your business to be successful.

Malware is one of the major security threats that plague the online operations of organizations. According to Accenture, malware attacks cost companies an average of $2.4 million. Furthermore, malware threats are increasing in frequency and sophistication on a daily basis. According to reports from the internet security teams at Verizon and Symantec, approximately one million malware threats are released on a daily basis.

What is Malware?

In basic terms, malware is a type of insidious software created by cyber criminals. It is primarily used to infiltrate and cause damage to computer systems and networks. Malware comes in different forms, which include viruses, spyware, worms and ransomware.

Over the course of this blog, we’ll discuss how malware can affect your organization’s website.

Alter Your Website’s Appearance

Something known as defacement, cyber crooks can use malware to gain control of your website and replace its content with their own messages. The purpose of this attack is to turn away the visitors of a website by offending them with explicit messages. These messages often have a political or religious agenda and hackers commonly target important government websites. Here is an instance of hackers defacing a Western Australia Government website.

Divert Your Visitors to Other (Often Malicious) Websites

Hackers also use malware to divert the visitors of a website to other, often malicious, websites. According to data, malicious redirects account for 17% of all malware infections, making them one of the most prevalent cyber attacks.

Cause Your Site to Get ‘Blacklisted’

Major search engines, such as Google, scan websites for malware. Sites that have been infected with malware may be removed from the search results in order to prevent users from visiting them. This is called ‘blacklisting’.

A search engine my also show a warning to visitors to let them know that a site is infected. You don’t need us to tell you that if your website has been blacklisted, it will lose traffic and the reputation of your company will suffer.

Allows Cybercriminals to Gain Access to Your Site

Cybercriminals use a type of malware called ‘backdoors’ to gain access to sites. Once they have access, hackers can wreak havoc in multiple ways which include changing your website’s appearance and exposing the sensitive data of customers.

A solid defence against malware and cybercriminals is imperative to the success of your company. With Lean Security’s professional security testing services, you can protect your website from malware and automated attacks. Contact us for further details

DDoS Attacks: All You Need to Know

Most people think that high-speed internet and increasingly reliable defence methods have made DDoS attacks a thing of the past.

They’re wrong.

The threat of a DDoS attack is very much alive today and is as dangerous as ever. Statistics reveal that there are over 400 DDoS attacks per day in Australia. Furthermore, GitHub, an American web-based hosting service provider was hit with a world record-setting DDoS attack in March of this year.

Over the course of this blog, we’ll discuss what a DDoS attack is and the dangers it poses.

What is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make a targeted online system or service unavailable by swarming its servers with traffic from multiple addresses, until the point the server goes down. DDoS attacks target all sorts of online platforms such as banks, online merchants and news websites. If successful, DDoS attacks can make important data inaccessible. These attacks come in a variety of different forms. Here are four of the most common ones.

1. TCP Connection Attacks

This type of DDoS attack functions by consuming all the connections to infrastructure devices such as application servers, load balancers and firewalls. TCP Connection attacks are so potent that they can even take out powerful devices that have millions of connections.

2. Volumetric Attacks

All about causing congestion, volumetric DDoS attacks either use up all the bandwidth within the network of the target, or the bandwidth between the network of the targeted service and the internet.

3. Application Attacks

Application attacks swarm a particular aspect of a service or an application. It can be very challenging to detect and mitigate these as they are even effective with a low traffic rate.

4. UPnP Attack

This type of attack attempts to exploit an existing weakness in the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play Protocol) to bypass most of the integrated defence methods and swarm the target’s servers and network.

Smokescreen DDoS Attacks

In addition to bringing down the targeted online service, DDoS attacks are also used as a decoy for other cyber attacks such as financial fraud and data breaches. In many cases, an incident of data breach is preceded by a series of DDoS attacks. Hackers use DDoS attacks as a component of an attack strategy. The hacking initiates with DDoS attacks which divert the attention of the defence team, leaving an open playing field for hackers to inflict some serious damage.

To ensure that the servers and network of your organization are safe from threats such as DDoS attacks, contact us at Lean Security. We are experts in web security assessment and we offer affordable and effective security testing services.

Cyber Security- What do the Number Say [Infographic]

As the world is becoming more digitalized, it has become easier for the cyber criminals to pave their way into the mobiles and computers to extract confidential data.

Here's How to Stop Your Network From Being Hacked

Don’t want you network to be hacked? Here’s how to stop your network from being hacked

Penetration Testing Trends You Need To Get Behind

To say that the internet serves as the backbone of any business wouldn’t be an understatement. Almost every company’s data is saved on cloud backup. Hundreds of online transactions are made every day. Millions of orders are placed online.

While there may be many upsides of technology, a prominent downside is the risk of cybercrimes. Cybercrimes are a major concern for businesses that operate online.

The Cyber Security Review suggested that the Australian economy loses $1 billion to cybercrimes annually.

According to Cyber Security Survey conducted by Norton in 2017, 1 in 4 small businesses were victim to cyber-attacks in Australia.

The rising risk of security breach has encouraged the use of penetration testing service. Almost every company undergoes network and web security assessment to eliminate possible loopholes in their network infrastructure.

While penetration testing is becoming a common practice, here are a few trends that every company should follow.

1. Examination after Every Change



It is important to analyse every change introduced in the network security or the products, to ensure the provision of top-quality service with no risk of security breach. Audits should be conducted on daily basis to secure internet data against hacking attempts.

2. Penetration Testing on a Timely Basis

Conducting penetration testing after fixed intervals helps in maintaining an impenetrable network. A minor flaw can lead to a major cyber-attack when it comes to network security. Your minor negligence can cost you millions of dollars.

PCI DSS requires an analysis of potential vulnerabilities and threats on annual basis.

3. Source code Assessment

Penetration testing is also concerned with the analysis of code to distinguish vulnerabilities and identify the areas that need improvement.

Static code analysis identifies potential risks at a much faster rate than Dynamic code analysis by implementing smart analysis algorithms.

4. Deployment of Firewalls

An additional security measure against cyber-attacks is the deployment of a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect applications against online malware and suspicious traffic.

Penetration testing service focuses on implementing WAF as an additional security measure, especially in insurance and banking industries.

Lean Security strives to provide top-notch services when it comes to securing your business’s network. We provide top of the line security services for websites and mobile applications to the international business community.

We assist you in improving your system security by conducting a web service penetration test, source code assessment, cloud WAF managed service, and external network penetration tests.