Even if you do not have any national security documents on your web site, it is very important to take your web site's security seriously. If you sell products on your web site, this is especially important.
There is evidence, as shown in many published reports, of in excess of 89 million data breaches of identity records. These occurred in the year 2007 alone. Go to the Identity Theft Resource Center and do some reading. The facts will throw fear into your heart. Businesses can now use companies that are specialists in handling financial information, and leave all the worries to them. A sales webpage will use links on sales pages for ordering which redirect straight to PayPal, 2CheckOut, or other payment services. When using this method, credit card numbers and all personal information from the customer is no longer dealt with or exposed.
But you are not quite out of the woods yet. As a vendor of a digital "soft product" that can be bought and downloaded straight away, you have to guard against digital shoplifting. There's lots of ways that people in your position leave their website goods on display, unattended - leaving people to make off with them without paying, if they know how.
We present the three most frequently occurring mistakes:
1. Easily guessable filenames.
If 'AdWords Secrets' is the title of your book, don't create a file name called AdWordsSecrets.pdf. It would be too easy for people to guess the URL to download your book that way if the URL is www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf, or something similar.
Making numbers such as a version number or date (example = AsWordsSecrets_v24.pdf, or AdwordsSecrets_20170606.pdf) as part of the filename will make the filename and corresponding URL much more difficult to figure out.
2. Indexing the product itself or the download page is the function of search engines.
It can be very difficult these days to keep the content on your website secret, as search engines have become so adept at spidering content on the web. Even without a public link, a search engine may discover your secret product download page and index it. When this occurs, your product download page will be visible to anyone using that search engine, and they will be able to access your product for free.
Look up your site frequently to see what search engines are picking up about the site. With the larger search engines sites, you can look up by typing "operator yoursitename.com. This should give you a listing of all pages on your site that is indexed.
3. An inadequately constructed Robots.txt
On your web server, you will probably include a robots.txt file. This text file is used by most search engines and tells them what to index and what not to index. Typically, you will want to prevent search engines from looking at certain directories that you use for statistics reporting or downloads. Theoretically, this should mean that search engines won't index any hidden, non-public, or secret pages on your website. Unfortunately though, some hackers may try to view the robots.txt file. This could make you vulnerable to someone possibly downloading your product without paying.
It is important to maintain the proper balance between protection of your files and directories in robots.txt and not allowing too much information about the structure of your site out.
Selling digital products online is a great business.
Article Source: http://www.orbitaloc.com/
Read more articles about Internet security on Nick Dalton's blog at www.TipsTricksToolsTechniques.com/. Don't miss his Digital Security Report - it's required reading for all information product publishers.
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