Best practices: Protect your server

11.05.2018 2,617 13

Martin Pramatarov

There are so many different things that can harm your server. In an ever more connected world, the danger of cyber-criminals is only getting stronger, and servers are the main target. There are hacker groups that do it just for fun and others that work for whoever pays. This creates a massive risk for any business that relies on servers connected to the Internet.

Why is it important to protect your server?

• Your business needs a server or servers, so your business can be available online. Without a doubt, servers are the backbone of modern digital infrastructure. Think about your specific business. Servers are in charge of storing, processing, and transmitting sensitive data that must remain confidential for security reasons. Therefore, protecting the servers of your business is essential to keep its regular operation, online availability, integrity, and confidentiality of all the data you manage.
• Business operation (availability). Servers are machines, and they require configuration and regular maintenance. Errors can shut them down. Cyber attacks target servers, and their purpose is to disrupt and overwhelm them until the point that access to your website gets denied for users. Your server or servers compromised by a cyber attack can mean hours of downtime, missed deadlines, and money loss.
• Compliance. The Internet has become a dangerous land for everybody. For this reason, many industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements for data protection. Think about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Protecting your server is a must to comply with the regulations and avoid heavy fines or legal action.
• Integrity. When you protect your server, you are ensuring the integrity of the data stored within it. Preventing data corruption, human errors, or tampering is not minor, and it is a must.
• Reputation. Lack of availability (downtime), security breaches risking the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data directly lead to a bad reputation. The trust of customers and stakeholders can be seriously damaged, and so your finances.

What are the biggest risks for your server?

• Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks). Due to the damage, they can cause, DDoS attacks (read what a DDoS attack is here) have a place on the top dangerous risks for your server. These attacks are executed using multiple sources of malicious traffic directed to your server. They can disrupt the server’s functioning, causing inaccessibility for legit users, money loss, and high fixing costs.
• Malware. Malicious software is designed to steal data and damage systems once it gets access (unauthorized) to your network. It is commonly spread through phishing (emails), infected websites, or attachments (files).
• SQL (Structure Querry Language) injection attacks. They are attacks exploiting web applications’ vulnerabilities (code to execute malicious SQL commands) to gain access to the database of your server. This can lead to data theft (login credentials, financial information, bank card data, etc.).
• Brute force attacks. Criminals guess your security password through a program that tries millions of combinations until it finds the correct one.
• Zero-day exploits. This is the name of software vulnerabilities that are not yet known. Therefore they have not been patched. Zero-day exploits can be used by attackers to gain access to your server for installing malware or stealing information.
• Physical attacks. Your server must ideally be in a safe space where only a very few authorized people can have access. Besides, the place must offer proper temperature and security. Having your server in a data center or within your premises, your server has the risk of physical damage. Humans (deliberately or accidentally) or nature (thunders, storms, floods, destruction caused by earthquakes, fires, etc.) can damage it.
• Lack of updates. Your server is a machine (hardware) that needs adequate software to work smoothly. Lack of proper maintenance, updates, and patches means risks for it and your complete online business. Criminals can find vulnerabilities to sneak into your server and cause damage on many levels.

Best practices: Protect your server

At this point, you are probably wondering how to protect your server. Is it even possible? The risks are big, but the good news is, yes, it is possible to protect your server. There is not an only way to do it. What you need is to implement a set of best practices that, combined, can reduce the risks and keep it operating smoothly.

Train your personnel
You would be surprised, but more than 40% of the security bridges are thanks to the mistakes of your employees. They don’t take seriously security protocols, like the ones related to their passwords, and enter sketchy pages. They must be aware of the risks, know how to identify them and react to prevent potential security incidents. You must reinforce this training regularly. Best practices must ideally become good security habits!

Limit access to your server
Not all of your employees require access to the server to perform their tasks. Especially not physical access. Limit permissions, both physical and digital, only for very specific people, well-identified, and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data or physical damage to your infrastructure (server).

Create hard-to-crack passwords
This is one of the best practices. Consider that passwords are the first defense line against unauthorized access to your server. Train your employees to create and use hard-to-crack passwords. Push them to change them regularly and forbid the password’s reuse across multiple accounts.

Implement multi-factor authentication
This will require users’ extra ways of identification (two or more, you decide), like a PIN, token, identification device, etc. This represents an additional security layer for your server.

Take care of your Remote access
You can use TLS certificates (learn what is TLS here) to verify the users. Limit the remote access by IPs. This way, you can stop many of the attacks. Another thing that you can do is to change the default RDP port. This will make it harder for the cyber-criminals to find it.

DDoS protection
Having the necessary technology to avoid or mitigate the super popular DDoS attacks will give you a lot of peace of mind. Choose DNS-protected servers if you are just starting, or apply a load-balancing method that can mitigate DDoS attacks and keep your servers running. Check out our DDoS protection service here.

Keep software up to date
Install every security patch as soon as it is out and update to the latest version of all your software. This will ensure the fixing of all known vulnerabilities. Don’t forget the drivers of your components too. You remember the Spectre and Meltdown, don’t you?

Use firewalls
A firewall is a barrier, physical or software, that limits access to your servers. You can implement it differently. The software is the easy option. You can also buy a router that has such a feature and use it to separate your servers from the Internet. Firewalls are essential components of security infrastructure. They protect your server by blocking malicious attacks and filtering unauthorized traffic.

Hide your Master/Primary server
You can do this by using a secondary server. You can use an API to synchronize them and show just the Secondary as a Primary. If an attack hits it, you will still have all your information safe in the more important Primary one.

Back up regularly
To have a professional strategy to back up your server (its data) and to do it regularly is one of the best practices we can recommend. It is a key action to prevent data loss caused by different factors, data corruption, hardware failure, or criminal activity (cyber attack, data breach). Remember, physical damage is a risk even for sophisticated data centers or premises. Better create different backups (backup strategy). You can check high-quality choices like backup as-a-service of Neterra.cloud.

Monitor your server
Your server is vital for your business to be available online and work properly. Permanently monitoring is a smart decision and investment. Permanent and professional monitoring can detect and alert you about suspicious activity, unauthorized access, or downtime. As a business owner, you know that downtime affects your business’ operation, customers’ trust, and reputation and causes money loss. No matter if you have a game server or you sell products online, downtime is a nightmare you want to avoid.

Besides, many good quality monitoring systems also collect very useful data for you to establish patterns and distinguish normal from abnormal activity, improve the general performance of your server, and prevent common issues from happening repeatedly. There are many types of monitoring and choices in the market. Check them out and protect your server!

Don’t forget encryption
This is a very powerful tool to protect data. Criminals look for accessing your server because they know how important the data it exchanges and stores and how key your server itself is for the operation of your business. Through encryption, you can keep the confidentiality of the data stored on your server.

Test constantly your server’s security
It is so much better to be you and not the cyber criminals who identify issues or vulnerabilities in your server’s security. You can get valuable insights to improve your security, add best practices to protect your server, etc.

Conclusion

Your server is an essential component of your business’ infrastructure. Implementing these best practices to protect your server will save you stress, insomnia, and extra burden for your budget. Remember that only one measure is not enough to protect your server. You need to implement a complete set of best practices. They reduce significantly the risks, protect its operation, extend its life span, and keep your stellar reputation!