Snap-hacked
Marketing | TechnologySnapchat is the latest high-profile site to have been targeted by hackers: in an event dubbed ‘The Snappening’, nearly 100,000 potentially compromising images have been leaked. Snapchat is blaming the third-party site Snapsaved, but the fact is these breaches are becoming more and more common with a new naked-celebrity story hitting the newsstands virtually every day. If even super-secure sites like iCloud can succumb, what hope have ordinary website owners against the hackers?
We quite often inherit websites from new clients that have been hacked and are being crippled by spam. In extreme cases, they’ve been taken down by the host, rendering the business completely invisible.
The damage this does to reputation and revenue is almost incalculable, so obviously the priority is to get our clients back online as quickly and securely as possible. To ensure this, we build all our new sites on our own dedicated servers so we can take full responsibility for hosting and backups. This is far more reliable than using cheap third-party hosting services, which often incur problems down the line.
We also make sure all our managed ecommerce sites are using the most up-to-date and secure transactional software – usually Stripe. Stripe, which is trusted by thousands of organisations, is one of the best and safest ways to accept online payments. We recommend it to clients who are building marketplaces, mobile apps, online storefronts or subscription services, because it incorporates lots of brilliant features and ensures automatic compliance with the strictest PCI requirements.
In fact, all our ecommerce sites are certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1 – the most stringent level of certification – because we understand the importance of security when it comes to dealing with other people’s data.
As Snapchat’s users have discovered, the damage hackers can do is no laughing matter. If you’re concerned about the security of your website, save yourself a headache and talk to our experts.
