Nowadays developing internet world we have to learn more about some of the most common security risks, including hacking, phishing and malware and how to protect your sites and servers. Thankfully, many of these hazards can be avoided by making yourself aware of the threats.

Hacking. Someone from another location breaks into your computer remotely to cause damage or steal information. Often this will include the hacker obtaining your personal information or turning your computer into a “zombie” to further their needs. Different hacking techniques include vulnerability scanners, password cracking, packet sniffers, rootkit, trojan horses, and key loggers.

Phishing. When a website is made to look like another website for the purpose of gathering personal information from a user. Phishing usually involves fake emails that appear to come from legitimate enterprises, such as your bank or credit union. These emails contain URLs that link to malicious web pages and will ask you to enter in private information, like passwords, bank account information, or credit card numbers. Attackers can then use the entered information to steal your (or your customers’) identity.

Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. Its only there to break stuff. There are several types of malware, including computer viruses, worm viruses, spyware, adware, scareware and crimeware. To spread Malware, perpetrators can create malicious websites of their own, exploit a vulnerability in the applications a website relies on or exploit a vulnerability on the web server or its configuration.
Malware is often download from an email attachment or from a suspicious website. However, malware can also infect servers and upload malicious code or web pages that deliver malware to the site’s visitors.

There are a few key practices that can greatly increase your protection from the majority of instances. To protect your sites and servers you should choose strong passwords that can’t be easily guess by computer programs. Additionally, keeping websites up to date with security patches is one of the most important means of protection. Companies often publish patches or security updates that are built to prevent these types of attacks.

Cloud Hosting is an innovative technology that is revolutionizing the way we do computing. The key concept of cloud is that you don’t buy the hardware, or even the software, with help of cloud hosting you make your investment smaller and oriented to operations rather than to assets acquisition.

Cloud can serve your needs to many different models, the important ones are:

1) Software as a Service (when you don’t need an entire data center or infrastructure or even your own server you might just need an application to perform a basic task like email, real-time chat, shared document writing, or social networking);

2) Platform as a Service (is a foundation upon which you build your own application. Forget about hardware concerns, low-level configuration, firewalls, backups, and such.The only thing you have to worry about here is the application itself);

3) Infrastructure as a Service (you outsource the hardware completely and build everything from scratch, it is just a combination of computing power and cloud storage made available to you according to precisely how much of each you need).

The pros to use Cloud Hosting. 

First of all, it frees you up to focus on what really matters: your innovative applications, your valuable users, and your crucial content without spending any time or energy on all the necessary infrastructure behind all of that.
Secondly, you can shift investments away from expensive and potentially risky capital expenditures to safer and more focused operational expenditures, where your money pays only for what you absolutely need.
Lastly, you will sleep easy knowing that all your data is safe in the cloud, housed and backed-up securely inside redundant systems, meaning they are virtually disaster-proof.