Essential Web Security: Staying Up-to-Date
We all know the Internet is a massive collection of sites with tons of content and functionality, and every website needs to be provided with website hosting and methods for making updates. A compromised website might redirect users to a malicious site which attempts to infect visitors with malware. For this reason, all hosting and updating needs to be secure for the safety of the website managers, as well as their visitors. Even the website for a Certified Ethical Hacker program was spreading malware for over three days before being fixed, which is somewhat ironic.
If it isn’t already, your website needs to be protected from malicious activity.
When providing website hosting and content management systems (CMS), one of the first things we tell our clients is to make sure both your server and CMS are kept up-to-date to prevent malicious activity. For example, there are thousands of websites on the Internet today using a version of OpenSSL that is over one year old. There have been important security patches made, which many of those websites haven’t applied. Similarly, WordPress is used by some of the biggest brands out there, but their websites won’t be secure if they don’t apply updates to protect themselves from newly discovered security issues.
For these reasons, Amperage has automated our website hosting’s security updates and have complete lock-down of the WordPress core files. We keep a constant eye on the next version available so we can update all of our hosted WordPress sites in one step. We constantly strive to provide a managed WordPress hosting environment which keeps our clients safe.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.