Protect Your Websites And Apps Using Sucuri Firewall

The internet is a very hostile place with people out to get you sometimes just for the fun of it. As more and more entities and individuals from Zimbabwe join the app and website building business they are learning about this fact the hard way.

For just $9.99 Sucuri can help cover your behind using their state of the art Web Application Firewall.

People take potshots at you the moment you launch

The moment you launch your site people ( or more accurately their bots) start taking potshots at you. It does not matter that your site is just a small site meant for your local business. You will have IP addresses from far and varied places such as Ukraine, the U.S, the Russian Federation (yes that’s the actual name) or China aiming for your head.

It would be tempting to try and do it yourself. I remember when I started I had a fail2ban script that banned anyone that attempted anything untoward. The problem is that for example most people share addresses ( I share mine with close to like 200 people) this means punishing 199 people for the sins of one. Often there is no guilty party but one of the 200 is using an infected computer.

The sad stories of random hacks

The truth is it’s hard to defend yourself against a targeted hack. Motivated adversaries will get you eventually given time and resources. The good news is that most attacks are usually random and automated. Someone unleashes their bot to go hunting for soft targets/vulnerabilities. A list is created by the bot and the bot owner can decided to attack or maybe the bot is usually programmed to attack.

The thing though is that there are so many bots out there and new vulnerabilities are being discovered all the time. Also despite what some hosts say they don’t provide DDoS protection on all layers. This might mean you getting shocking hosting bills on limited plans or Amazon, your account getting suspended and your site/Web App offline.

We have had so many stories of hacks here including the Golix breach and the HIT website breaches, Ownai(Tengai), Econet , Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, Zimbabwe Independent,  The Finance Ministry Website, I could go on but every other time we get hacked sites. Sometimes these go unreported for example I remember encountering a malware warning in Chrome when attempting to visit a local banking site.

Sucuri to the rescue

The thing though is that Sucuri’s firewall would help with most of these drive by hacks and even custom hacks. When you sign up your site gets to take shelter behind their firewall. All traffic is filtered and handled by the firewall before it gets to your server. Their world class firewall comes with the following features:

• CDN and HTTPS ( Cloudflare only provides these to co.zw domains starting at a whopping $200/month Sucuri provides these at $9.99)
• Instant Blocking of Hackers
• DDoS Mitigation and Prevention (Layer 7 in all packages and Layers 3,4,7)
• Virtual Patching and Hardening i.e. even if your CMS is not patched and up to date you get protection as traffic is filtered
• Protect Brand Reputation you will not see yourself in the news as another victim
• Prevent Zero-Day Exploits as they are virtually patched on the firewall
• SSL & PCI Compliance via Firewall this is pretty important if you want to receive payments
• High Availability / Load Balancing thus preventing dowtimes, you can have multiple servers to handle the load and prevent downtime thus achieving a near 100% up time
• A cache server that reduces load on your server

With the $20/month package and more expensive packages you can get your site cleaned professionally and patched by experts in the even that it was already infected. These packages however require you to make a yearly payment which comes with discounts.

Signing up is easy

• Head up to Suciri’s CloudProxy page
• Choose your desired package
• Click on Sign up and create an account and make your payment using either PayPal or directly using a MasterCard or Visa Card
• Once you have signed up you can easily add your site yourself or create a support ticket if you are unsure what to do and you will get help in minutes
• Configure your firewall to white-list Sucuri’s IP addresses and take the opportunity to block all IP addresses from contacting your server (make sure you don’t lock yourself out in the process!)
• That’s all

If you are unhappy

Well if for some reason you are unhappy with the service you can always cancel and get your money back! That is a novel concept most Zimbabweans are not used to. What with all the rubbish service we get from banks and other businesses who don’t offer refunds. Sucuri are so confident of their services they know you will not cancel.

Yes I use Sucuri

Every morning I get a neat report showing me a list of who has been gunning for me and what they tried to do including the IP addresses of my would be foes. Sometimes for really grievous attempts I contact their ISPs with the hope they will lose service for their naughty deeds, some ISPs actually act and apologize to me!

I have slept easy knowing someone has my back. You could sleep easy too.