How Safe Are Our Sites From Hackers?

[Dave]

You may have seen recently in the press that porn sites have been hacking into various uk sites including schools and putting pornographic adverts on their sites with links.

Been looking at one of our site stats this morning and notice today we have been visited by 5 very dubious domain names. For example
the-f***.biz

These are all american sites which is no great surprise and obviously I can block the IP addresses via the admin control panel.

So I was wondering how safe our sites are from hackers and is there anything we should be doing (and perhaps are not) to protect ourselves?

[Joanne_UK]

Hi Dave,

I don't think that we there is anything on our side to stop hackers. This is usually done at the server level with firewalls,etc...

I am not sure but I don't think banning the ip on the admin control would not stop anything hacking your website (it has to be banned at the server level) however I would like to know what banning an ip does exactly...? Is it just that they would not see the website (get an error)?

Even if you ban an ip they could change to another one and access your website again.

Joanne