Services

Website Integrity - Website Monitoring

Website Integrity - Website Monitoring

The risk of website hijacking and website defacement has been on the rise in the past few years. A hijacked website can be used to steal your customers’ credentials, conduct fraudulent transactions, or simply be used as an act designed to embarrass you. Unlike DNS poisoning with which traffic is directed to a malicious site, website hijacking takes control of your site by modifying web page content or inserting traps. One effective way to detect such violation is to check the content of a number of selected web pages. Suggested pages for this service include non-dynamic but critical pages within your site, including the home page, shopping cart, contact us and about us pages. Another is to validate your IP Address on your DNS server. We conduct a series of Content, Edit, DNS, Ping and Fetch tests every hour to address this. This extensive validation confirms that:

  • The selected pages have the content you intended, and nothing has been added or removed

  • There have been no unexpected edits made to the pages that may indicate a hacker attack or a virus insertion

  • Your domain name resolves to the expected IP address

  • Your web server is always responsive and available;

  • There is no embarrassing http error when visitors access your website



Content Test (Required Phrases)

A required phrase is one that must be present for the content to be correct. By raising an alarm when a required phrase goes missing, we catch corrupted updates you have made to your website (mistakes), or changed content by unauthorized individuals (attacks).

  • We check your web pages for required phrases every hour and raise an email alarm if any are missing;

  • You supply the phrases that are expected to be found on the corresponding web pages;

  • As a final safeguard against unauthorized edits, including corruption by hackers and viruses, we can optionally raise an alarm each time the page changes.

You may update the phrase lists as you require. Content testing is suitable for pages that change frequently but maintain consistent keywords and key phrases on them.


Edit Test

To help you detect unauthorized changes to your web pages (e.g. in the event of website hijacking), we notify you whenever our system detects any change to the web pages you identified for checking. Dynamic web pages or pages that are frequently updated may not be suitable for this Edit test as you may receive alerts to your own updates. If you’re aware of these changes, just ignore the alert. If you weren’t expecting any changes made at that time, our alert will be an indication of a configuration or security problem.


DNS Test

Our system checks your domain on hundreds of DNS servers to make sure that it maps to the intended IP address. By frequent validations of your domain to IP address mapping you will quickly find out if your domain has been hijacked for malicious acts ranging from traffic diversion to identity theft.

To perform the DNS test our system:

  • Confirms your domain to IP address mapping is correct every 15 minutes

  • Checks accessibility to your primary and backup authoritative Domain Name Servers

  • Provides a trace of the route if your Name Server is unreachable to help diagnose the problem

Passing the DNS test indicates that visitors to your website will indeed be accessing your site and not unknowingly be redirected to a fraudulent site.


Ping Test

Our system probes your web server to confirm that it is responding to the very basic internet request. This is the most fundamental and essential state required to assure your website is accessible over the internet.

To perform the Ping test our system:

  • Pings your Web server to make sure it is reachable and responding every hour

  • Provides a trace of the route if your server is unreachable

  • Filters out transient errors by reporting only consistent errors detected through multiple ISPs

Passing the Ping test confirms basic connectivity, but does not indicate whether the pages of your Website are available to browsers.


Fetch Test

The Fetch test sends HTTP requests to your web server to retrieve a web page. This test will confirm you web server is operational and responds in a reasonable amount of time.

To perform the Fetch test our system:

  • Checks the HTTP response for a URL on your Web server every hour

  • Catches HTTP errors such as "Not Found" or "Access Denied"

  • Reports very slow server response with a "Timeout" error

  • Fetches the contents of the URL if the Web server indicates it has changed since the last visit

Passing the Fetch test confirms that your Web server is responding to browser requests for the pages of your Website, but does not mean that the correct page content is being served.

RESOURCES