Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

Is your website secure?

With the ongoing rise of hackers globally, it’s never been more crucial to protect your website, networks and computer systems from damage or data theft. Cyber security shouldn’t be an afterthought. If your website is hacked or hackers get to your software and data, your website can be forced offline, shutting down your business, or landing you a fine for losing sensitive data.

When deciding your approach to cybersecurity, think how much you’d lose if your site was compromised. If your eCommerce site has to stop trading on Black Friday, or your charity has downtime on its biggest fundraising day, it could be catastrophic. If you’re a company that holds lots of users’ personal information, you may also face a huge fine from the Data Protection Commission. 

At Matrix, we prioritise cybersecurity at every stage of the development and support process. Each site we develop or support is protected from security threats such as malware, ransomware, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, phishing, denial of service and many others. 

We maintain basic website security by:

Secure hosting setup

When setting up hosting for your online system, we make sure servers and other network elements are set up correctly, and only allow the type of traffic required to run the service. 

We fine-tune every single element in the hosting service, irrespective of its scale. We review multiple times before it goes live and is tested again.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a basic brochure website or a large-scale cloud system, we have the same dedication to these fundamentals. 

Security maintenance

Setting up hosting services with best industry practice in mind is a good start for your website — but you need to maintain this level. This is why we provide an ongoing support service-level agreement (SLA), which gives us a mandate to maintain an optimum ongoing security standard by keeping all software packages and all configuration files up to date, and in line with the latest threats and vulnerabilities.

Keeping software and plugins updated

All content management systems are prime targets of automated hacking attempts, but these platforms often release security patches in response to attacks. We can make sure your site is fully up to date through monthly checkups and only using well-supported systems and plugins.

Making sure the codebase is up to date and secure

Code is what runs your website. It manipulates, transforms and saves all the data that is entered, handled and stored by the website. It is essential that your code can do this without being compromised. Secure codebase together with a secure hosting setup form the basis of a secure web system, and we ensure this is the case for all our clients. 

Disaster recovery and contingency

Prolonged downtime could be a disaster — especially if you’re an online retailer or charity. As part of our SLA, we guarantee to maintain regular backups stored on multiple secure locations, and a disaster recovery plan so your system can be brought back up as soon as possible. 

Strong support service level agreement (SLA)

With our ongoing support SLA, we bundle all the above ingredients of a secure reliable website into a single ongoing service. You will have a team of 45+ professionals across many fields of expertise at your disposal, keeping your online system working like clockwork, and ready to spring into action in the case of a security or availability incident.

We offer various SLA levels, with 99.9% or 99.99% uptime guarantee. We offer consultancy on all related topics, and we can review your specific situation and options for making your online operation sustainable, reliable and secure.

Enhanced website security

If you’re a bigger organisation or you’re dealing with sensitive data or financial accounts, sometimes you need to go beyond the basics. For enhanced website security and peace of mind against malicious cyber threats, Matrix combines many strategies and approaches while implementing or building your website or app. 

Web application firewall (WAF) 

A WAF protects your apps by monitoring and blocking malicious traffic, and preventing unauthorised data from leaving the app.  

Secure coding and development

We’ll write code that can still function normally even after it’s been attacked. 

Follow proper coding standards

We write code that adheres to universal software conventions, so it’s less prone to mistakes and security breaches.

Sanitising user input

Alter the site so users can’t attack by SQL injection — entering malicious code into input fields. 

Fine-tuning virtual private servers

No hosting platform is 100% safe, but a virtual private server (VPS) is an extremely secure option that we can provide. With a VPS, your files, software and operating system are isolated and separated from other instances. 

Flexible security solutions

As your website grows, so does your customer base — but also the risk of all that wasted investment if it fails because of a security breach. 

The setup and architecture of your web servers is critical. Secure web hosting protects your data from fraud and makes sure your servers are running 24/7. Secure web hosting removes malware, monitors networks, restricts access to secure information and more.  

At Matrix Internet we don’t do generic hosting plans. We’ll work closely with you to find out your hosting requirements and create and secure your hosting platform. We cater for all requirements, whether you need hosting on a shared server, a hosted solution, a virtual private server (VPS), a cluster or global cluster. We can build in full 100% redundancy and implement the appropriate security measures. 

 

Security support and testing

It’s hard to stay one step ahead of hackers when millions of them worldwide are developing new approaches to breaking through your defences. 

At Matrix we have a proactive approach to cybersecurity, based on prevention and anticipation. Over many years we have developed a comprehensive approach to testing security systems, and offer many distinct services.

We use numerous industry tools, our own code and our testing experience to deliver the best results.

Vulnerability testing

A high-level automated scan that analyses computers, systems and networks and reports possible security weaknesses.  

Penetration testing

An extremely detailed approach to finding vulnerabilities — it involves ‘ethical hacking’, simulating a real hacker getting into the system to find weak points and extract data in a way that doesn’t damage the network. 

Cloud security audits

Matrix can conduct a comprehensive audit to make sure your cloud-hosted apps and data are safe, by evaluating security controls and their ability to mitigate threats. 

Source code reviews

We will go through your source code, line by line, to see if we can find any security vulnerabilities. The earlier we find flaws, we minimise the chance of a security breach.  

Incident investigation and resolution

The worst time to think about security is after an attack. Instead, be prepared with a comprehensive incident investigation and resolution plan. If you have a security breach Matrix security consultants will quickly identify and resolve the issue. We will then draft a personalised strategy for your company to identify, manage, analyse security incidents in real time, while mitigating for the future. 

We’ll train you to monitor and report all incidents, develop mitigation steps, resolve incidents and learn through actionable findings.