8 Ways to Improve Your Website’s Frontend Security

Cyber attacks are bound to take place if you have an online presence. You can’t help it. Despite having security measures in place, hackers and cyber attackers find a way to break into the system. Even today, in 2022, cyber-attacks are a common practice. They haven’t got any lesser, in fact, surged after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the globe. There was a massive shift from physical space to digital space, be it schools, colleges, or workspaces. And since no one really was prepared for this catastrophic event, it exposed scads of vulnerabilities that hackers embraced.

We say technology is advancing, but so are cyberattacks. Time and again, hackers develop new ways to breach a website’s security. If you haven’t taken strict security measures for your website, you too run the risk of allowing attackers to easily break into your website. However, with the right tools and strategy, you can minimize those risks if not eradicate them.

Related: Everything You Need To Know About Penetration Testing

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some of the preventive measures you can take to keep your website’s frontend security intact.

1. Pay Attention to XSS Attacks

Cross-site Scripting or XSS attacks have remained one of the major problems for website owners over the years. The reason is, there are many websites that have their comment section enabled or use some sort of a public forum to allow ‘genuine’ visitors to share their opinions (or leave comments). However, hackers exploit this opportunity to add malicious scripts to the website.

In order to prevent these XSS attacks, you need to adopt a proactive approach. You’d have likely written plenty of custom code on your website. If they weren’t written with XSS attacks in mind, you’d need to rewrite them by following some secure XSS practices.

If you don’t have a website yet but are looking to build one, you should use secure libraries with built-in XSS protection, such as OWASP Enterprise Security API, to protect your website against those attacks.

2. Use a Modern Framework

Javascript frameworks have become a mainstay of modern web development. Most of the websites today are built around a JS framework such as Vue, React, or Angular. These frameworks offer substantial benefits as far as a website’s security is concerned.

Angular is considered to be the best in this aspect. Though other modern frameworks provide a good level of protection against a variety of XSS attacks, they aren’t quite as extensive as Angular.

Angular protects against several XSS vectors and offers encoding for simple outputs through {{}}. Additionally, it sanitizes the output when using innerHTML, and also at the time of using variable URL or CSS, ensures the values are safe to be used in this context. All these things happen automatically.

3. Add an SSL Certificate

If your website is currently on HTTP, it’s time that you move it to HTTPS. All it requires is an SSL certificate. Getting an SSL certificate adds an extra layer of security to your website. Also, it makes your website look trustworthy. You’d have often noticed yourself that a non-SSL website displays messages like “The connection isn’t secure”, which can raise trust issues among visitors or customers. If daily transactions take place on your website, it is strongly recommended that you add the SSL certificate to it as soon as possible. This will keep your site secure by authenticating its identity and encrypting server information.

You can purchase an SSL certificate from domain and hosting providers. Many even provide it for free with their package, and it only takes a couple of minutes to set it up.

4. Be Careful With Third-Party Scripts

It is a common practice to use third-party libraries and open-source components in JavaScript-based applications. But it also tags certain vulnerabilities which you can only control to a certain extent.

Be careful when selecting third-party scripts as not all third-party scripts can be trusted. Install only the ones that have good reviews and display transparency in what they do to safeguard a website. Also, be mindful of which third parties have access to your which web pages. Being more selective would also help you comply with the GDPR regulations.

5. Update Software and Plugins

The server, software, and plugins keep receiving updates. And more often than not, these updates are related to security. Updating them ensures that your website is in line with the latest security standards. So, make sure that your website is on the latest software and has the latest plugins installed.

Install a professional security plugin that regularly scans your website for security issues. Such plugins can help you with Audit Logging, IP Logout, Firewall, Scheduled Security Scans, Vulnerability reports, User-agent Banning, and much more.

Moreover, you should get rid of inactive plugins. Outdated plugins are more vulnerable to security risks and you never know when they get involved in a security breach. The best thing to do here would be to remove the unused plugins to mitigate the risks.

6. Stay Updated With The Latest Security Trends

Apart from the above-mentioned updates, also keep an eye on the latest security trends in web development. Cyberattackers are always finding new ways to infiltrate websites, and you need to be one step ahead of them always. For them, it’s just about finding one loophole but that one loophole can cost you heavily.

7. Compartmentalize Your Website

Compartmentalization is believed to be a way to minimize the impact of client-side vulnerabilities. If your website receives and stores sensitive user information, you should compartmentalize it in distinct meta fields. By doing so, you will be able to prevent the ‘entire’ sensitive information from being accessible in case of a single leak or hack.

8. Content Security Policy (CSP)

Content Security Policy (CSP) is an additional layer of security that works as an HTTP response header and allows the creation of whitelist sources to allow only trusted content to load. In other words, when CSP is enabled, it allows only secure scripts to run, thereby helping you prevent XSS attacks. It helps the browser identify and mitigate the impact of XSS attacks and other vulnerabilities.

Summing Up

Anything that is on the online space is never safe and secure. And security breaches can happen to anyone whether it’s a small website or large. However, by following the right practices and implementing the right tools on your website, you can minimize the security risks and improve your website’s frontend security to a great extent.

At Dew, we perform different kinds of security tests and can help you safeguard your website from external threats and attacks. Get in touch with us.