Website Security- Antivirus and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) is a secure and encrypted protocol that is used for transferring files securely over the internet. SFTP is becoming more common to transfer sensitive and confidential data. In terms of development and maintaining of your website, using SFTP can help securely transferring data between your local device and your website to ensure data cannot be intercepted or tampered with.
Cross-Site Scripting is a type of website vulnerability that is commonly found in web applications and websites. Usually a bad actor or attacker is able to inject malicious code into a website, where there is an option for a user to type or interact, whether that’s a simple search box, login form to a website, or when going through the checkout process to buy a website or if your website allows queries and does an interaction with your database, e.g. https://mywebsite.com?testVal=Test123. Injected code from the bad actor could be executed by unexpected users who visit the website and could create a fake payment form to steal your customer data, theft of your data, and other security related issues.
To mitigate this vulnerability, sanitizing, encoding and validating all inputs that can be entered on your website to ensure only the data that you require is accepted and stops malicious code from being passed to your website. Using a Web Application Firewall (WAF) can also help with blocking malicious traffic and requests.
You probably have some an antivirus tool on your laptop or device, to help check for malware and other malicious content and software. But similar scanning procedures need to be placed on your website. Malware can have a damaging impact on files, steal sensitive information, and allow unauthorised access.
There are various malware scanning tools available, and use various techniques to detect and remove malware.
It is important to perform regular scans on your devices and websites for malware to help prevent damage and protect all your data, and it is equally important to ensure your scanning tools are up to date as well as your website in general.