In the past 18 months hacker attacks have increased by 600%. Protecting your most valuable marketing asset – your website – could not be more vital than it is today. Security ambivalence could lead to spam links, injected adware or malware – all of which could result in the degradation of your website rankings, online marketing performance, and sales. There is also the strong possibility you could be delisted (or sandbagged) by the search engines.

Hackers generally target innocent, legitimate websites with their drive-by-download malware in order to send out mass viruses. In former days they spread viruses through executable files via email but that’s too much work for the newest breed of black hatters.

Every month more than a million pages are infected and Google delists hundreds of websites, so its very important to be preventative, not reactionary when it comes to your website security. Here are a few tips you can consider towards protecting yourself:

1. Consult Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

2. Perform a Vulnerability Assessment

3. Assign someone on your team security maintenance and request regular reports

4. Change passwords regularily (although some softwares allow modifications without passwords)

5. Be aware that advertising displayed on your site could be a source to bring in malware since most include direct links to other sites

6. Check out Juniper and Cisco Firewall Solutions

7. Install anti-malware to detect and quarantine infections

8. Remember there is no perfect preventative measure so read and be pro-active

Social networking sites also pose some additional security hazards. The usual advice, not to give out birthdates and carefully screen every link request are obvious. But how do we know if the link itself is secure? On Twitter a 17 year old created a cross-site scripting worm that could have affected every account holder. This points to future Web 2.0 worms which could threaten other social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and My Space.

A former FBI computer forensics examiner, who heads up Facebook’s security team recommends reporting malware, not sharing passwords, and bailing out of Windows to Mac or Linux.

As web applications become more sophistocated and mobile devices outpace PCs in adoption, attacks will only increase over multi-platforms and sites. As many attacks are now  wide scale and automated we need to fight back in some concerted way. It is welcome news that President Obama has made cybercrime a priority by committing some serious dollars to fighting it. He very recently unveiled his White House Cybersecurity Policy.

The web is a powerful medium where the elusive malware attacker lurks understanding very well the vulnerability of our ecosystem.