security scanner
My brother is fresh out of college and looking for a job. Unfortunately, he can't decide on what to do, and is looking into everything from teaching English abroad to working as a consultant to starting his own business. This third option, starting a business, involves buying a website and running his business through it. He wants to provide services through his own website so that his customer base will be unfettered by geography or store hours. We started to discuss one of the main hurdles to his business - what is he going to sell? We bounced some ideas around before moving on prematurely to advertising, which is the trade off concern that attends owning a web business.
I learned that he recently bought a website domain name last week and was thinking of moving forward with it when one of my computer savvy friends warned me about website security. I had never thought about this issue beyond the basis: my brother should use firewalls, password protect everything on his site, and not do anything crazy like give open access to his website infrastructure to the public (which, if you knew my brother, might not be too far fetched of a scenario.)
I started to look things up and came across the usefulness of using a security scanner for your website. At first the idea sounded strange, but what it basically does is that it checks your website for any security loopholes. Almost all website owners nowadays use basic precautions like firewalls, but many don't know of more sophisticated attacks such as sql injection. Sql, or structured query language, is present on many websites, especially those that allow outside users like customers to access their website to check their account or make purchases.
Hackers can use sql injection to query the main database and gain access to information beyond just the online shopping cart or message forum. This is why a security scanner is so necessary. I told my brother about all this and at first he didn't believe me until I showed him some news articles I dug up about recent sql injection attacks on high profile sites that could have been prevented had the websites used security scanners to look for security leaks on their websites. He took heed and said he would look into it. Of course, after we figure out this security issue, we still need to figure out advertising. Oh, and we also have to figure out what he is going to sell!